Sunday Morning Post

Love.

Oh sweet love. Everyone wants it. Poems and songs are patterned to imitate it. Valentine's was created for it. Movies, TV shows, stories tried to interpret it. Yet love remains elusive, at least elusive enough to remain away from one's understanding, in similar fashion a butterfly hovers near gleeful watchers but far enough from one's intention to capture it. We all want to understand this most mysterious thing. Even science stepped into the picture, using "crude" attempts such as psychology and biology to define what love is. In the midst of technology and the liberal arts, with a shallow touch of tradition, the enigma of love stood, untouched and misunderstood- as always.

In hopes of comprehending what love is, people came up with a vast collection of terms, just to explain this "queasy yet enjoyable feeling." In came romance, infatuation, fate & destiny, and the inevitable true love. Quotes, mottos, idioms were written to support these fabrications and surprisingly enough, the majority actually believed all these. Theories were formulated, ideas were conceived, and fairy tales were confused with facts. All of a sudden, the world has become one, big love story, a teleserye bound to incite goosebumps on the hopeless romantics all around.

Such hallucinations may benefit a world ravaged by the twists and turns of an evolving society, a new opium to which men can turn to in times of depression. Of course, like any other drug, an overdose of "love" has its own life-altering, mind-boggling effects, effects which can worsen the problems already established by the pangs of reality. Perhaps the media has influenced us way too much that we can no loger distinguish fact from fiction. Or we crave too much for that "queasy yet enjoyable feeling" to the point of addiction and dependecy.

Ok, the above paragraph may be exaggerated, but I assure you the exaggerations were limited to a minimum. We all want love in our lives, for it is the only thing we can turn to, the one side that will never betray us. To survive in a shackled existence, we have to cling on to the sturdiest foundation we can think of. There is a risk to depending on intangibles however, the most familiar being the state of delusion in which we look for facets of fiction in our way of living. This may not be as intense or as relevant as political conflicts, celebrity fist fights or small/large scale wars but it does greatly affect a person's perception. Since no two people have the same perceptional makeup, this leads to varying (and dare I say, adverse) intrapersonal and interpersonal effects. As a result, we have political conflicts, celebrity fist fights and small/large scale wars. All because we wanted to define love.

Unfortunately (and obviously), we can't force oursleves to dump our misguided concepts of love. The best thing we can do is to remain aware and bound to the ground, with the knowledge that love is not meant to be measured, comprehended nor understood.