Love Connection

I love men. I absolutely love men. The idea of men, manly things, muscles, voices, mannerisms, and so on. I love my grandpa and my dad, I love my guy friends, I even appreciate ex-boyfriends. Girls are nice and all…but men are that golden mystery I will never stop trying to mine, eventually to make one mine.

Men and women alike, we try for connections. Whether artist, author, engineer, accountant, actor, or chef, curiosity and need propel us to try connecting one thing to another for stability, understanding, creation, or profit. Some connections save time, some push the limits of truth; most uncover some power of love.

Every connection causes a reaction. For every reaction there is a preceding action, how for every lesson there is first a mystery. Sometimes the mystery is lessened as we learn from our hardest choices, our deepest pits, our ineffable feelings, our thickest fears. Or sometimes it’s from the tiniest glance or the lightest touch or the faintest sound that we feel or learn the most.

It’s personal. Until it’s personal, it’s someone else’s. We want personal. We want to learn, to know for ourselves. We long to experience, we desire, we crave, we plunge into experience.

Sometimes we desire that personal part of ourselves to include another; like the gears of a clock, any move we make, they move too. And, on for a while, one experience moves two people, two people move one life. The tick and tock of two hearts, defying time and reason: love is an ultimate experience.

Love is a timeless experience.

That is why you can’t wait for it to come.

That is why, when you’re living in it, you can experience, grow old, and die and it still holds you as though you were just born.

That is why sometimes, when it’s gone, it feels like you’ve never moved, even if you’ve crossed the world a thousand times, even if you’ve left it entirely and come back.

The time it takes to learn what love is is the time experience travels from the head to connect with the heart. No one can tell you what you’re feeling, translate your love for you; you will learn that as the right and wrong connections are made. Like me, you’ll make plenty of mistakes and maybe regret a few choices. But that’s how I needed to learn, and I am glad it took some time to learn the right ways for me to learn love. And I suspect I’ll have yet more to learn, all the time.

Like time, love moves constantly forward—only not carelessly with or without you the way time does. Though there is no rewinding love, and no returning to past love, the same way we can’t go back in time, at least love will faithfully accompany us individually, at our own pace. Love is always present, to one degree or another, and in the present it moves us: forward, inward, to unknown depths. The more we allow ourselves into love, the more we can build on love, making relationships, finding understanding, forgiving, loving anew.

I say anew, because, well…for example, some years ago I loved a boy and I thought I did so wholly. But that ended, or at least passed, and what I realize is, now that that love no longer connects two people in the present, if I were to love him again, the two of us would have to build a new, selfless love, one balanced between two in the present. That’s what I mean when I say there is no returning to past love. (Not that if you feel without love that it's beyond relocating, no, not ever.) I won’t find love by looking back in time; I have to burrow inward and keep moving forward. Love fits in hearts, not in time.

I also mean to say that love evolves at every new moment. Love builds, love wanes, love is very active. Life is not bound by time the way it is by love. As time thoughtlessly cycles life through deterioration and growth, love is the force that enables an endless expansion of goodness in every direction. It is as gravity: a law immovable, but with flexible capacities. Airplanes thrust into the air, obeying and utilizing gravity’s properties, and gravity is not changed. If gravity didn’t consistently press us down, to rise would raise no challenge. Thus we are always designing ways into love, out of love, around love…and we can because love will always be.

That is how it is timeless, that is how it waits. It waits for us to rise from experience and to learn what its connections feel like within us. Then it can propel us in any direction, out of any depth, through any fear, and into another’s arms.

I believe in the love of Olympic potentiality: golden years, with silver hair and bronzed skin, together to the end. I believe such love takes work, and that that glorious labor refines the worker. The final product of a life well connected by love is that heart of gold we all seek. In ourselves and in any other.

Life is about timing. Love is the expansion of a lifetime.