FALLING IN LOVE

Valentine’s Day offers business, choice to identify the right boy or girl for life and above all the sweetest choice of falling in love. It offers an entire season with lovely options for both those seeking a little romance and the brokenhearted. Above all it is a season, to ponder about and to explore love!

What are little boys made of?
Snips and snails and puppy-dog tails’
And such are little boys made of.
What are young women made of?
Sugar and spice and all things nice,
And such are young women made of.

What all the world is made of ( 1820)
ROBERT SOUTHEY

he poet must have had his tongue in his cheek while writing these words. It seeks to present a summary of the scientific data on sex differences along with the major social implications that follow from these differences.
Our channels of mass communications are increasingly overloaded with sex symbols. The marriage manual has replaced the slim volume of verse on the engaged girl’s reading list. The hero in our fiction and drama has given way to a scruffy character you might call the anti-hero. Love, the post Freudian generation may tell you, is what happens in Victorian novels and old movies on television. Love is for the squares. Yet we all know, in the secret hearts we so casually deny, that love, for young and old, is the ultimate salvation. All who have loved and been loved recognise the great enduring truths in classic love poetry. Love does add a precious seeing to the eye. Love does soften brutes and add grace to virtue. And love does bear it out even to the edge of doom.
The romantic tradition could be defined as an un-self-conscious respect for an emotional arrangement between a man and a woman, with each side happy to express the best of its own characteristics. Within the framework of this tradition, there is room, on the one hand, for gallantry, for the courtly gesture; on the other, for feminine reserve and demureness and calculative pretty ways.
People like to indulge in the discussion of a particularly virulent and dangerous form of divine madness called “ falling in love;” which is from a practical point of view, one of the most insane things you can do, or that can happen to you. In the eyes of the person in love, the boy or a girl can appear to be a god or goddess incarnate. Everything might remind them of his or her loved one. Once you get into it, it is something like contracting a chronic disease, and we sometimes try to resolve it by making it the basis of marriage.
When we go back to its origins in the Hebrew and Christian traditions, we find that the idea of marriage and the experience of falling in love are rather separate things. In early agrarian cultures, no one ever chose their marriage partner. Largely marriage was an alliance of families. It was contracted not simply for raising children, but also to create a social unit smaller than a village. The elders had an enormous voice in deciding whom their children were going to marry. They would dicker amongst themselves and use go-betweens in considering not only whether this girl was suitable for their son, or vice versa, but also what kind of dowry she would bring, and whether it would be advantageous to the families to form such an alliance. Of course, until quite recent times, these things were always important in marital affairs of royal families.
In the feudal conception of marriage there came what was called “ the Cult of Courtly Love,” which was largely a result of the poetic movement centred in southern France during the middle ages. According to one theory, the knight or courtly lover, who was also a poet, would select a lady to be his heart’s desire – preferably a married lady-and he would yearn for her, sing songs under her window, and send her messages with little tokens of his devotion. But according to this theory, he could never go to bed with her. Not only would that have been adultery, but also it would have spoiled the state of being in love. The state of being in love was always to be an unfulfilled and unhappy state.
Falling in love is not a mere sexual infatuation; it is a much more serious involvement. Falling in love is a thing that strikes like lightening and is therefore extremely analogous to the mystical vision. At the same time it is important to realise that falling in love is not same as love.
Interestingly we say, “Falling in love”, and not “rising into love.” Love is an act of surrender to another person; it is a total abandonment. In love you give yourself over, you let go and you say, “I give myself to you.”
To many people it is madness because it means letting things get out of control, and all sensible people keep things in control. Actually, the course of wisdom, what is sensible, is to let go, to commit oneself, to give oneself up; and this is considered quite mad. It is thus that we are driven to the strange conclusion that in madness lies sanity.
Everybody has different ideas about love; we are all like those blind men before an elephant. For some love is a happy emotion, for some others love is a happy emotion, for some it means sadness, for some it is possessiveness, for others it concerns materialistic aspects. Everyone does not look at love from the same perspective. Love cannot mean the same for two different individuals.
There are many contradictions in life. The same goes true for love. In the hyper paced life of people in these modern days particularly in the metros and the big cities, ‘I love you’ has become an empty and casual expression, almost like a punctuation that crops up mechanically without deep feelings or emotions.
The gestation period between meeting the partner and falling in love has drastically come down. Like instant coffee and noodles, in this age even love seems to happen instantly! It looks as if love existed only in the good old days and today it has gone out of people’s lives.
Despite this love is very much alive and kicking. Many would like to hold on to it and make all kinds of sacrifices for love. Percentages might have changed. But love is very much present in our midst.
Many people express the fear that as the world surges to the space age and a materialistic life, life will be snuffed out. On the contrary, I believe that love will emerge stronger as mankind makes more scientific and material progress. When you have everything to live for in life, you are still ready to die for true love that is reciprocated.
Some responsible elders feel happy to see the youth falling in love; it is a sign of maturation. They speak of all the great men and women whose names belong to the ages loved- mind, heart, body and soul. And they carried their love proudly, as an army carries its banners.
Even the men one would imagine incapable of a sensitive or delicate passion nevertheless loved. Jonathan Swift, sometimes called “the hangman of humanity,” put down his cruel pen and wrote to his beloved Stella in baby talk. Among Swift’s personal effects, found after his death, was a lock of hair, wrapped in a small scrap of paper on which he had scribbled “Only a woman’s hair.” Dr. Samuel Johnson was so devoted to his wife, Tetty ( an unattractive lady many years his senior), that long after her death he kept her wedding ring near him. Keats, dying of tuberculosis, desperately lonely but of the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination.”
The heart, as another poet has said, is never given out of the bosom in vain. Of all unrequited loves, one of the most touching was that of William Hazlitt, the eighteenth-century essayist, for a common lodging-house girl called Sarah. Though she accepted Hazlitt’s gifts, Sarah mocked and deceived. When finally she left him for another, his wound was deep and bitter. Still, not long afterward, he could write to a friend, “When I am dead, who will love her as I have done? When she is old, who will look in her face and bless her ?” Heartbreak comes, but wisdom lingers. Listen again to Hazlitt, this man who loved not wisely but well. “Perfect love has this advantage,” he wrote. “It leaves the possessor of it nothing further to desire.”
February 14th is celebrated as a day for love, exchange of gifts, promises of eternal passion, and more. It is not only for the boy-girl friendship and love; it is a day meant for all who love. The inspired pen poems inspired by their love and admiration for the women of their dreams while others just go to shops and buy commercially available verses. Mutual sympathy is also possible for the lonely youngsters in the website mutualsympathy.com. It also offers moments to retrospect and to love one’s own self. Valentine’s day is made so real by all these.
Today, Valentine’s Day is celebrated as a holiday in some countries honouring romance. Boys and girls no longer pick names out of a jar just as we read in ancient history, but instead exchange valentines with token messages of affection. In the tradition of Great Britain, children often exchange small sweets, while adult lovers give each other large cases of sweets and gifts.
While the exact origins of Valentine’s Day are slightly murky, there is no doubt that it is not just a holiday from the modern times. Instead, it is a chance to both honour the history and modernity of romance and affection.

You have all the time in the world!

The sense of having only a limited time causes many people to fret and worry. The most valuable thing people can spend is time. Simply because there has to be an ending, they imagine that they peak at 50 or 40 even 20. An elderly US senator once commented on how the attitude of so little time suffocates the human spirit: “Most people say that as you get old you have to give up things. I think you get old because you give up things.”
Our world is made human by people with a quite different time sense. The great political leaders, scientists, social revolutionaries and great religious leaders, all of them had a very different time sense. The British novelist E.M. Forster once wrote of them: “The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society were eternal. Both assumptions must be accepted if we are to keep open a few breathing holes for the human spirit.”
Because they act as if life were eternal, the great ventilators of the human spirit always feel that they have time to be available to others. You can read their attitude in their faces and postures. The person who is at your disposal turns towards you, tilts a head, bends an ear, lights an eye.
What miracles that simple act of being available can work! All of us remember, almost as moments of grace, occasions when people have released our spirits just by lending us a sympathetic half-hour. Remember the elders who set aside a lot of time to be available to the young generation. Can we forget this sacrifice of theirs?
“Being available” is an attempt to put into English the French word disponibilite, the state of being at one’s disposal. Philosopher Gabriel Marcel, borrowing the word from financiers, who speak of “available funds,” coined this usage to describe a rare human quality. Marcel applied it to people who “open a line of credit” to other persons. We should all do that. Each of us should make available to others not what we own, but what we are.
Availability can be brief, but it must be sincere to ventilate the spirit. We find our casual friends saying, “Call me any time. I’m at your disposal.” But will they be on hand without grudging in your moment of crisis? And will they be there to toast, without envy, your good fortune?
Bored and lazy people have time, but may have little to offer. Time is what they want most, but sadly what they use worst. The people most available to us are often the busiest and most important.
Important, yes, but not self-important. Self – important people equate time with money. They are skeptical in relating with people because they lose time and as a result lose money. Gabriel Marcel noted that often people who are burdened with egos, money or degrees allow no one else to enter their inner worlds. They close themselves off. He called this crispation, to describe people who become crisped like dry autumn leaves.
Nothing “crispates” the soul faster than the delusion that it is too late. This delusion permeates our culture. We are told that “physicists do their most creative work before the age of 30.” Crispation makes us hermits. “There is no time!” we rail, and turn our backs on others and thereby on the future. We miss the best things in the world by fretting about the lack of time.
Time is a system of folds which only death can unfold. For many of us it is difficult to come to terms with time. It takes a sense of eternity to make one realise that there is time, time to be available and to create. When we don’t create we are dead
We are starting a new year. Let this year help us change our attitude towards time and people. Let us begin to say that we have enough time for the people who come to us.
Instead of saying we are limited by time and space, can we say we have time for others, and space for others? It begins in choice, I shall make time! I will not be closed off and crisped.
We must, of course, sometimes close the door to be alone with ourselves: alone with thoughts and books and soul and may be God. For only people with a strong inner core can be usefully available to others. Historian Arnold Toynbee called this “withdrawal and return.” In private hours we become the person who will be usefully available to others. Then we can offer them the gift, not of what we have, but of what we are. Be sure, then, that you have all the time in the world and so be available!