A more hopeful Valentine’s day?

“Nature bore us related to one another … She instilled in us a mutual love and made us compatible … Let us hold everything in common; we stem from a common source. Our fellowship is very similar to an arch of stones, which would fall apart, if they did not reciprocally support each other.”

Being inside of relationships, being outside of relationships, wanting, not wanting, in love silently, terrified by commitment, I’ve seen a whole bunch of different sides of different coins on February 14th.

Of course I could riff on and on about the commercial trappings of this holiday, and how it leads so many to crush so many others under the weight of colossal expectations, or I could drone on about the decidedly unromantic and apocryphal origins of the holiday as a Christian tradition rooted in beheadings and story-telling.

But that can all rest in the dusty past.

What we should concern ourselves with, is a different kind of love, a better kind of love. Seneca in the passage above speaks to our common nature as humans, of how we were born here to rely on one another, as we are decidedly a communal species. In this life some of us are the base stones, and some of us are perched precipitously within the arch, and then there are the keystones, the people we rely most on, to help us keep everything together.

Like those stones, we’re closer to some than others, and for others in our lives, we play different parts. This is because love doesn’t have to be everything to everyone. To some the purest and greatest form of love you can give is to simply understand differences, and in turn it’s possible the best we can do somedays is to give our fellow man a wide berth, if we can’t always be someone for them to lean on.

That’s the miracle of love, and the human condition, and our relationship as an individual to the main – we are all these different stones, and to others we play all these different roles.

Seneca in his life lost a son and his first wife. In his time of exile from Rome to a far off land Seneca’s mother too, lost her son. And so from grief, and from sorrow, and from separation, comes a whole different view on love: appreciation, if we are able to look upon life in that fashion:

“Joy comes to us from those whom we love even when they are absent… when present, seeing them and associating intimately with them yields real pleasure”

For some love is a fire that burns bright, setting alight the world around them. For others love is quiet, and bashful, unbeknownst to another soul beyond the beholder. For others still love has been silenced completely, given to death and whatever is beyond in perpetuity. It is a cruel bit of irony, that that final love is the truest kind; as there are no vices, no further evil, no stronger a test than can otherwise disprove it’s permanence than the archway that is the final door. For those still here, that love us, and that we love, let us be mindful that while we live, we will fail, and come up short, and so too will those around us. Love then, should be as much about forgiving as it is forgiveness.

So let Valentine’s day be a chance to love one another in our own ways – to be good to one another, to forgive one another, and most importantly to try and understand one another. As we’re all here simply to lean on and be leaned upon each other, otherwise it all falls apart.