This will be odd for me to type, but I’m beginning to believe this. So here we go.
Everyone is capable of love.
And I think I just heard my own brain explode from typing that.
Love is a concept I have struggled with, if I’m completely honest, probably my whole life. I mean I knew I loved my mom, my dad and my siblings. I loved my dog. I loved my friends. I loved running around outside and popping tar bubbles on the street during the summer break I loved even more. But I also loved The Simpsons, and my Barbies. I loved Bugs Bunny, I freaking loved Space Jam. Did my love for these inanimate objects make my love for the people any less valid, and the other way round. Does loving so many different people and things spread your ability to love around or are you given a set amount of love and each time you utter the word ‘love’ you take some of your stock pilled love away?
If we only have so much love to give, would we be more cautious with it?
I have been beginning to wonder if love is a kind of currency. Like the Euro, Dollar or Pound. Maybe kindness and compassion are a kind of currency as well. Maybe we create both tangible and intangible things to trade with other human beings so that we can get what we need to survive and to get through this beautiful tangled mess of a thing we call life. Through that we are able to get love. We are able to give and receive love, kindness, support, empathy, sympathy and compassion. Whatever we need in that moment to endure. We are not solitary creatures, but I do wonder if this is something that evolved right along with us as we crawled out of the primordial soup, grew legs and learned how to walk upright. That as we became more evolved and complex our currency did too. That our concept of love may have been just giving each other food and warmth to survive to the complex dating rituals we have now. Even having a family can seem to be complex and overwhelming at times. The rules we have to obey and the currencies that may not be accepted within certain circles or by certain people.
Love is a currency. Sometimes not accessible. Not accepted. Accepted by everyone, everywhere. Accepted by a few, or by many. Accepted by only one. Accepted by non. Love is a type of currency we trade, we share, we gift, we receive, we crave, we need, we want.
Love is what can make us better. It can help us, it can hinder us, but in the end, it makes us better. We learn from it, we forget from it. We become sane with it. We become insane with it. Love is not simple. It is not just saying the words and then you’ve given it to someone or something. It is in everything we do. Our words, our actions, our thoughts, our vibrations, our chakras, our prayers, our meditations, our books, our magazines, our yards, our homes, our families, our blood, our tears, our sweat, our souls. It is in everything. Maybe it’s even in our DNA.
Does that make it easy to understand?
Hell no.
I don’t even begin to understand that currency. How I can fully trade someone my love for theirs. I can give a lot of in my version of the currency, but the full trade of here is my heart, forever and ever, I have no idea how that currency works. I think that’s like the stock market. You can watch the stocks get traded and see what goes up and what goes down. What has had good history of return of investment and what has a questionable history.
We play with our hearts like trading stocks on Wall Street. We gamble with them like we’re in Vegas. Sometimes we get a good hand and manage to play it just right and end up winning big, and we know when to walk away with our big return. Sometimes we bet it all on a crappy hand and walk away with nothing, feeling empty inside. Sometimes we keep trying to win big with not to great hands and mediocre stocks that will never be capable of giving us what we need.
Sometimes we win big in a foreign currency. We get the jackpot with someone we know is capable of love, but we miss the mark with it. Because we get that love in a currency we can’t use. It doesn’t compute. It can never really align with what we need, or even want. Does that mean we should throw it away because we can’t use it? I can’t answer that. It’s so dependent on the person and the situation. There is no black and white, all or nothing with love. It’s just a big messy grey area that has so many shades of both black and white on top of it.
When we win big with a foreign currency, we have the ability to adapt ourselves to accept it. Especially when it comes from someone who we have craved love from. The problem with this is that we can sometimes be selling ourselves short. That we were so desperate for the love from that one person that we would accept it and bend over backwards when we got some version of currency regardless of our ability to use it.
So yes, love is a currency that everyone is capable of producing and trading. But it doesn’t always mean it’s a good thing or that it’s a beneficial thing either. It is what it is. Messy and complicated.
Photo Credit: (Tofu Photography – http://tofuphotography.blogspot.com/2011_10_30_archive.html_
hixton collective 