Aliya Naseer Farooq
Most things in life begin with love. Most actions are based on love. Most decisions are taken for love. Why, then, is there so much hatred, hurt and heartbreak all around us?
This question haunts us all, at one time or another. Love, passion, longing and all related emotions spring from the heart and come from that special place in our life that only we have access to and even we do not completely comprehend this fountain from which so much springs forth and, in turn, shapes our choices, our paths and our life.We may love something today and grow out of it a year or two down the road. We may think that we have fallen in love with someone and come to know that we were deluded. We never took the time to know the object of our love or ponder upon the reasons for our love. All that seemed superfluous and mundane. After all, isn’t that how love is supposed to feel? All fuzzy, warm and cosy. Love is supposed to sweep you off your feet! Only to leave you up there in the pink clouds for a while and then land on your head when the fizz fades away. Your head hurts as does your heart and what’s worse is that you have not the faintest idea of what went wrong? Where? How?
Love may be blind but please keep your eyes open and do not walk on love’s red carpet with eyes wide shut. Love’s filmy version, the cotton candy puffy stuff we yearn for is, after all, only sugar. Sugar goes to your head making you all cozy and cuddly but an inordinate amount of it also sends you into a coma!
Love, like so many other notions, is constantly being redefined. Every century struggles to coin its own terminology and invent its own definitions of love.
The Elizabethan Renaissance has left us some of literature’s most enduring explorations of desire and love. Sydney, Spencer, Marlowe, Donne wrote with layers of meaning about the personal nature of love. Romanticism developed individualism and took nature in its embrace. Many Romantic poets revered idealism, passion and mysticism. Blake, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Byron romanticised the world of nature to the levels of Pantheism. Ghazals in the subcontinent mystified and eulogized the theme of love. Each couplet, shair, an independent poem, hence containing an ocean in a drop. Mir taqi Mir, Mir Dard and of course, Mirza Ghalib took ghazal to legendary heights.
We love like we live but are not always able to explain the why and wherefore of it. Like life, love does not happen in isolation. There are multifarious factors involved – personalities, responsibilities, preferences and above all, commitment. Commitment is a key element. Commitment and the strength of it is the tide that takes your ship to the harbour. It is your anchor upon reaching your destination and it is the wisdom that determines which battles are worth fighting and which ones can be avoided by silence or won by tact.
Fate – the silent spectator in the corner also smiles upon the wise, the patient and the committed. That is why our darkest times lead up to our brightest moments. Fate may bring us to the end of a road but it is commitment that takes us exploring the neighboring forest, only to find that, ‘.. The end of the road is actually just the discovery that (we) are meant to travel down a different path. ‘ Danielle Koepke.
The writer is a teacher and a writer. She has written columns for English dailies such as ‘The Nation’ and ‘The Frontier Post – Lahore
