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14 February 2011

Happy Valentine's Day: Love Stinks

21"I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies."
Amos 5:21, Old Testament of the Bible

    The God of the Old Testament apparently found Israel's professed love for Him, ostensibly demonstrated alternately through partying and piety, to smell like rotting flesh in the summer sun.  Several millennium later, the J. Geils Band may have stumbled upon more truth than humor in the these A.D. 1980 lyrics from a song and album titled "Love Stinks":

You love her
But she loves him
And he loves somebody else
You just can't win
And so it goes
Till the day you die
This thing they call love
It's gonna make you cry
I've had the blues
The reds and the pinks
One thing for sure
(Love stinks)
Love stinks yeah yeah 

     I'm gonna get right to the point this Valentine's Day.  I'm not preaching, I'm passing on a lesson I've learned the hard way, from my mistakes.  I can chase that feeling of lovestruck euphoria until I fall asleep for the last time and I'll never get anywhere near love.  I may get lust, infatuation, obsession, or worse, I may get a lot of people to cosign my bullshit and tell me how well I've chosen.  But I won't get love.
     I'll find love when I make a decision to love another person and follow through with loving actions.  Patience, tolerance, and kindness seem like good places to start.
     Looking for that special someone who thinks like me, someone I connect with, someone with whom I have chemistry, turned out, for me, to be Grade A baloney.           
     Years of sunrises and sunsets, filled with countless opportunities to love, were lost on me.  I would not have, maybe I could not have, recognized love had it fallen on top of me.  The result was a profound disappointment, the disappointment that only unmet expectations can engender.      
     I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point after my fourth decade on this little blue planet I made a conscious decision to let go of my expectations and begin to accept the ones I'd been given to love without any conditions, people I didn't choose in the first place - my mother and father, my sister, then outward in concentric circles... my extended family, my neighbors, coworkers, those who share my city, my state, my country, the world.  Learning involves a daily decision to love through loving thoughts, words, and actions.
     All of my best ideas about how to "get" love proved futile, for just that reason.  I was giving to get.  I still do that sometimes, and guess what?
     No love, just stink.

Happy Valentine's Day