Love Well

What to me is the lens of Love: an eye for my dream family.

If there is something that surely initiates maturity, it’s Parenthood—when you have a kid(s) of your own, all these questions come rumbling at you—how will my child(ren) live; survive? Where will they stay and with whom? What influence? How will they turnout?. All these are very tough questions but the deal breaker is that they can’t be avoided, you have to gird you roins like a man and look for answers—at times these answers are very hard to find, in the event of frayed relationships,the binding force could be those children: Love is what stays in the midst of all that can go wrong, that’s the lens of Love.

When I sit down to write about love, my heart melts because I know it so well that love is the most important thing on earth. I was talking to a friend recently in a chit-chat and I remember eloquently signaling this, ‘if there is one thing I talk about with Authority, it is Love’—I have loved, been loved and suffered for love. I have wanted to give up on making compromises for love so many times but every time I am at the verge of surrendering, I am reminded that I would rather not give up on Love itself but believe in love again since it can always be found and nobody can live without love. Here, I am looking at the bigger picture of love. The intent for this article though is for frayed relationships and marriages. I want to begin with inference from one of the articles I wrote with utmost intent—a decade of love—like I am doing for this. I am fetching this for the start: “Yes, every war needs a strategy as CLARA says at the start of the movie:

 “There always seems to be something to fight for. But one thing has remained true of every war; behind the field of battle, someone has developed a strategy. I find myself amazed that of the many battles we engage in today—be it money, control or matters of the heart, very few know to fight the right way or understand who we are really fighting. To win every battle, you have got to have the right strategy and resources, because victories don’t come by accident”.

I may not have been married [though, at times it feels like it] but I can offer road-tested truths about the perils of human frailty in the realm of dating as well as marriage. The thing about life, I have learned from my personal experience, is that if you pay fidelity to growing through Life; there is so many things you will learn even before you are ‘old’—wisdom in this case has a life blood link to learning, unlearning and relearning. When it comes to love, self-realization together includes the right of each partner to pursue individual interests. I think it may take about five years for a young couple to discover that “we do everything together” is sentimentality not love. The most unnerving thing in love, I think, is the loss of emotional unity. When the emotional touch flickers out, trouble ensues, for love to thrive the two people in love have to be emotionally attached to each other: it always takes two to tango, that’s for a fact. Jimmy Evans had it right, ‘the only way two things can become one is when both things sacrifice’.

I learned from Laurie Lee, What Love Must Be: “We are indefatigable love-seekers all. Why, then, are we often defeated finding durable love more difficult to win than almost any other ambition? To be in Love of course is to take on the penthouse of living, that top most toppling tower, perpetually lit by the privileged radiance which sets one apart from nether world.

Love should be an act of will, of passionate patience—flexible, cunning, constant;proof against roasting and freezing, drought and flood, and the shifting climates of mood and age. Most of all it must be built on truth, not dream, the knowledge of what we are, rather than what we think it is fashion to be. The sum of love is that it should be a meeting place, an interlocking of nerves and senses, a series of constant surprises and renewals of each other’s moods—best of all, a steady building, from the inside-out, to extend its regions where children and live and breathe.

 

This seems a promising ground yet the fact remains that love fails more often than it succeeds—a failure due chiefly to the intolerable pressures of the age. Love needs to seed in a certain space and quiet—and even marriage requires some single-mindedness. Love still has intimations of immortality to offer us, if we are willing to pay it tribute. If we can learn to forget the old clichés of jealousy and pride and not be afraid to stand guard, protect acquiesce, forgive and even serve. Love is not merely the indulgence of one’s personal taste buds; it is also delights in the indulgence of another’s”

Recently I did a review [as a privileged member of the Beta team for the raw manuscript] for the upcoming book from my selfless literal mentor, C.JoyBell C, the Conversation of Dragons. When I had just started reviewing the manuscript, I proclaimed it was and will be one of the most powerful books ever written. I was struggling to write something I really needed to write, this article, I must say it is part of why I have finally put word after another. You can find the review(s) on LinkedIn and also on the blogcatalog. Like I say [partly] in that review, “the book offers a sublime deep look into the perils of human frailty in ways only the Conversation of Dragons ever will. She doesn’t mince words; she induces the readers to looking beyond their ego and while at; it she encourages self-love. I learned that from the ‘thirteenth tenet’ and if I am to paint that picture more accurately: believe people when they show you who they are. It is not only fair to them; it also fair to you. When you become honest, healthy person, you can cultivate honest healthy relationships with others”—(Dragon unto Dragon, Creed unto Creed).

Where I am right now, I have discovered some very profound truths about humanity; I will not be selfish but rather share with my fellow human siblings: ‘No two human beings can possibly live in the most intimate emotional relationships without sometimes frustrating each other. Understanding is needed because where Love is blocked it turns to anger and hate. To think there are no things to be given up for each other is to suppose love costs nothing

Love is self-discovery and self-fulfillment through healthy growth with and for the other person. Real Love will grow as the years go by. The very experience of loving will lead to the discovery of how to love better. The only thing in the world as strong as love is truth, and there are reasons for believing that as far as marriage is concerned they are different aspects of the same thing. A deep and an abiding love is the emotional response to an intellectual recognition of the truth about another person. Love’s development, like that of a tree is not a steady progress but an irregular one. The art of Love is Patience till the spring returns. But what we have really loved one another can never be lost. Its influence on our personality is always with us, and perhaps even death doesn’t take it away.

That said, relationships are fucking hard. Every day is a new challenge but you find ways to get through them together, like Player 1 and player 2 in an endless runner video game. Obstacles never stop flying at you. Sometimes you get hit in the face and have to start again and other times you catapult off your partner’s back and smash that shit to pieces and are showered in gold coins and celebrate with high fives all around. Every day I am reminded how blessed I am to have Shane’s mother in my life. I have never known someone who could make me laugh so hard and yet cry so hard; I can’t help but burst into tears and in the next moment she can have my brain hurting with a question or fact that I have never considered but I am so desperate to get to the bottom of. I will be the first to admit. I’m overly emotional, stubborn, slightly addicted to social media, messy as hell and can surely put what I feel into words—I guess that’s part of my magic charm

Every one of us knows in his heart that he could be a better person—more tolerant, more unselfish, more generous, and more kind. None of us ever fully lives up to his ideals, but the encouraging thing is this: improvement is always possible. Sometimes willpower can do it.Sometimes Prayer. Sometimes words on a page. “Our chief want in Life,” said Emerson, “is someone who will make us do what we can”. Veteran marriage counselor Emmanuel Hallowitz, assistant professor of psychiatry of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine once declared: “In almost every disrupted marriage there is, on both sides, self-deception.” On the other hand, the ability to look at yourself hard and honestly—admitting both the good and the bad—is the most powerful untapped source of human energy.

As you grow through life you realize manners are an important aspect of relationships— “Manners,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, that champion nutshell-putter, “are the happy ways of doing things.” And he added that people are always watching your manners, and awarding or denying you prizes accordingly. Certainly good manners soften the hard edges of reality. They lie at the heart of that mysterious thing called charm. They can be oil on that troubled sea of matrimony. How to have them? Imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes. Then treat him as you would like to be treated—that’s all.

“Wisdom,” says the dictionary in a hopeful attempt to define the indefinable, “is the ability to judge soundly and deal sagaciously with facts, especially as they relate to life and conduct.” But everyone knows that wisdom is more than that. It is a kind of glow that lights a man’s world when he has experienced .It is the invisible plus sign that all of us would

like to have added to the sum of our lives.

“Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Whatever you call it, it remains distant and difficult goal that most of us seek, all through the days of our lives. I thought of what I would have for my last article this year (2016), what I envisioned as a Year of Yes, and I came to something about Love—it has been a year of rugged paths but in the end I have seen myself through—the greatest men are usually the simplest, the most approachable and the most willing to share the insights that have made them what they are. Sometimes they were given by a wise teacher or an understanding parent. In any case, fortunate is the person who is privileged to catch a spark from one of the immortals—and pass it on

 I, Grace Abaho (Sr), have been molded by both nurture and nature—thanks to you my dear literal Princess of a mentor, C.JoyBell C, for helping me have the confidence to radiate to others what I find. I love you, God richly bless you, forever indebted to you.