Oh Everest, My Everest

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings." (Anaïs Nin)

Before I found this quotation, I had come to an understanding that love (at least for me) is something that comes stealthily, mysteriously, even arbitrarily, and that its survival is largely independent of present circumstances. I am fairly certain that the rest of the enigma lies in the fact that love is too often conflated with the behaviors that surround it. So here I am now trying to untangle the mess for my own sanity. I'm sure there's a big, overly personal entry brewing in me, but I'm not quite sure what it's about yet. Well, I think I know who it's about, which should be half the battle (yet isn't), but it will probably be a little while before I understand what I've got on my hands, and I want to get some ideas down now.

Matthew expressed my initial thoughts pretty eloquently when he blogged about the quotation. (Matthew, you stole my twinkie so I'm helping myself to your homemade pie, if you don't mind. Deal? Deal.) The part that resonated with me most was that blindness is sometimes just holding your eyes closed against the light. Everyone I know either has strict rules about their romantic behavior or careens through relationships with nary a responsible thought. A small (very small) percentage of my acquaintances make seemingly reckless decisions that are actually just the right thing. The ones with rules look at the minority group and think that they are being helplessly foolish, but that just means they are following a logic the others don't understand. I'm still figuring my own rules out, but I've learned enough to know that using somebody else's rules doesn't work for me. That's the whole point of having the rules, isn't it - so that they improve my life by working for me? Anyway, Matthew nailed this feeling I had right on the head. The effect of blindness may actually come from blindness as a cause, but sometimes we have different reasons. Blindness is not weakness in and of itself.

Right now, I can't mentally separate my romantic behavior that's Just Plain Stupid from the behavior that Society Just Isn't Used To Yet. Furthermore, my instincts are telling me that both possibilities are way off because Everything I'm Doing and Feeling is Okay. I just don't have the theoretical framework to explain it yet. The closest I've come has been by using Paul Graham's ideas (again), à la What You Can't Say. I'm challenging society norms by challenging my own boundaries. Thinking outside the box. Saying words I can't say. Doing things I can't do. The end results, I trust, will be positive for everyone involved.