Their Story

I think one of the most intimate things you can do with another person is to simply sit with them, listen, and share in their story, not with any other motive than to be there for them and allow them the opportunity to be open, completely vulnerable, and, for once in their life, free, as you walk hand-in-hand with them through their hopes, their fears, their dreams, and their stories of who they are and how they came to be the person sitting across from you at this point called the present.

Anything Less...

It influences and inspires us; it drives us to madness and obsession.  It can as easily lift us up as it can bring us to ruins.  Nothing moves or changes us like love.  There is no greater motivator or demotivator than love or its absence.  It is the driving force of our lives.  And yet we have no idea what it truly is, do we?  We all call it the same thing, but we all carry different definitions for it, while still expecting others to know exactly what we expect out of it.  And if we don't receive it just the way we want it, it turns from love to bitterness to hate to apathy and all shades in between.  But then again, love – real love – does not hate or have indifference.  Love does not cause madness or ruin.  It's the ill-conceived ideas, the distorted definitions, and the unfounded expectations of love that do.

We treat love like putty, moldable and conforming, in our hands, but we lose our grasp on love precisely when we try to control it.  For love is unchangeable, more consistent than gravity and more painful when we fall from it than from a twelve-foot ladder.  We forego its amazing breadth and depth for a shallow drink that quenches us for but a mere moment.  We remain blind to love when we think love overlooks when, in fact, love makes us see things more clearly – it's just that those with a truer view of love choose to love in the face of even the most odious.

Do I love it when people do me harm?  When people try to control or take advantage of me?  Or steal from me?  Do I love being belittled or marginalized or altogether forgotten?  No.  But I love those in spite of these things.  For love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends.

If your love comes with terms and conditions; if it knows not sacrifice, but only how to consume, to feed your ego and solely satiate your desires; if your love does not create the beautiful and the whimsical and instead leaves a bad taste in the mouths of those around you, is it love or is it something else?  Love never expires, never sours, never excludes.  It knows no bounds.  Anything less is not love.