I questioned my mood as I stood there. Then I wondered about love. I began with a flight into the past. Into my youth I mean. There, I saw the poetry of innocence, where it was as if love was a word used to label the sexual excitement of all young people. It was bravado, it felt like counting numbers, filled with irredeemable sorts of achievements, and then outright mistakes. It was a time when a theory of love mattered momentarily. As youthful love is hasty to leave you, just so you can know another. I thought I understood it. Especially, as cinema, media and television, only confirmed my innocent assumptions in their portrayal of love in the middle-aged population. Theirs was a portrayal of love as if it was merely the habituation of the middle-aged by the prescribed structures that be in society. And for the old, it was revealed as a reciprocated dependence of the old on one another.
Then as I wondered into the present, I understood that I had taken little from necessary lessons that youth had given me. It wasn’t my fault. It was nature’s fault. I understood that one could only live one’s generation, and I could not blame myself for what I just couldn’t know. I knew that I needed to know more. And so I questioned my present understanding. I found that as I grew older, love had become that something that I did and used to know about myself. I found that it had become that something new someone told me about myself which made me feel good about my actions. It was that passion that kindled when I talked to somebody I had nothing in common with, and then still be fascinated by their charisma. It almost felt as if love came in wishes. And certainly, good love brings many wishes. It had become a relentless sentimental need, and it was wrecking when one did not have it. It is fundamentally the art of persistence itself.
But as I looked upon my life, I found that the moments when I truly lived were the moments when I had done things in the spirit of love. So I feel as if I understand a little more right this moment. Consequently I started to consider what I really understood about this striking feeling; love. I realized that to me, there were three kinds of love. There was that which commands, there was that which obeys, and there was that which betrays. All these are distinct in their right. Except for love is between two people, and that the passion which anyone of these give rise to is not always the passion of the other. Still, I concluded that the greatest happiness I have felt with people was when I sensed that conviction that I was loved by them. Loved for myself, more so, loved in spite of myself. Then I recognized those who have loved and love me. They loved me simply because they loved me. It was a chaste understanding to know that they needed no reasons to just love me. This was that.