Love Is Something We Cannot Keep

We spend a great deal of time talking about love.

We write songs about it.

We write poems about it.

We make movies about it.

We give people cards covered with hearts.

And yet, after all these centuries of talking about love, I am not sure we understand it any better.

Perhaps we are trying too hard.

Love is one of those things that becomes difficult to explain when we actually experience it.

You can describe what it means to love someone.

You can list the things you appreciate about them.

You can tell stories about the first time you met.

But the description is never quite the thing itself.

Love is something you enter.

You discover it in the small moments.

A cup of coffee made without asking.

A hand reaching across the bed.

Someone remembering how you take your tea.

A phone call just to say, "I was thinking about you."

A husband and wife who have been together for decades and still laugh at the same silly joke.

Love isn't always dramatic.

In fact, some of the deepest love in our lives is almost invisible.

It lives in routines.

In patience.

In forgiveness.

In showing up.

In staying when staying is difficult.

Perhaps that is why growing older can teach us something about love that youth cannot.

When we are young, we often think love is about finding someone.

As we grow older, we discover that love is much more about becoming someone.

Someone who listens.

Someone who gives.

Someone who understands that the person beside us is not ours to possess.

That last part is difficult.

We want to keep the people we love.

Of course we do.

When something matters deeply to us, we want to put our arms around it and hold it close.

We want to make sure nothing changes.

But everything changes.

People change.

Relationships change.

Circumstances change.

Our bodies change.

Eventually, every relationship encounters the truth that nothing is permanent.

The forest understands this better than we do.

Trees lose branches.

Leaves fall.

Old growth becomes new growth.

Nothing is wasted.

Everything becomes part of something else.

Perhaps love works that way too.

The love we give to our children becomes part of who they become.

The love we give a friend may carry them through a difficult year.

The kindness we offer a stranger may be remembered long after we have forgotten offering it.

Love moves through us.

It doesn't necessarily belong to us.

That may be one of the reasons love can hurt so much.

We discover that loving someone does not give us control over what happens to them.

We can care deeply and still lose.

We can love someone and still disagree.

We can love someone and still have to let them go.

And yet letting go does not erase the love.

Sometimes it proves how real it was.

I think that is one of the great mysteries of growing older.

We become more aware of impermanence, but we can also become more capable of appreciating the moment.

The conversation at the kitchen table.

The walk around the neighbourhood.

The familiar voice.

The hand in ours.

The ordinary Tuesday that, years later, we would give anything to have again.

Maybe the essence of love is not holding on.

Maybe it is being fully present while we have the privilege of holding someone close.

And when the moment changes, as all moments do, we carry the love forward.

Not in a bottle.

Not in a photograph.

Not even entirely in memory.

We carry it in who we have become.

And perhaps that is the one place love can never really be lost.