Love, Love, Here We Are

If you love something, you’re probably going to have to let it go at some point. But, you can still be friends. Let me elaborate –

You can’t be a miser with your love. You just can’t. It’s not fair. If you keep the objects of your love too close to yourself, you’re not helping them; you’re just being selfish. You are restricting them from doing the things they want and need to do, whether they are people, animals, vegetables, minerals, books, or miscellaneous. And at the same time, you'll never be able to expand and get out of your comfort zone, because your comfort zone is right in arm’s reach at all times, which is nice, but you never grow that way, because you don’t need to.

You have to be willing and able to give away pieces of your heart and not expect anything back if you're going to feel love. 

I’m not saying that if you feel like you could maybe potentially one day love something, you need to let it go now, because you don’t and you shouldn’t. Love is a feeling and an action (and a virtue!) and if you don’t let yourself have it, you miss out and then you’re a terrible person living a miserable life. 

What I am saying is that you can’t keep everything you love right next to you all the time and forever. You can love it and you can keep it right inside of your heart, but chances are, at some point, something might have to change. The change might not even be that dramatic, but it might be.

One of my most favorite song lyrics ever is from Derek Webb: "Love's no politician, because it listens carefully." I don't mean to pick on politicians, but to focus on the listening carefully. Love listens carefully and considers what the party being loved needs, even if you would rather not, even if it makes you cry.

Letting go of things you love doesn’t mean love is gone or leaving. Sometimes it’s an expression of that exact love: letting go means you’re allowing the object of your love to grow or you’re giving it the room it needs to live its life. Letting something you love go means that the way you express your love changes. And a lot of times that’s sad and hard. I can’t really think of many comforting words to say about it.

If I’d had the option at the time, I wouldn’t have gone to college. High school would have lasted forever and I would have been in youth group forever and I wouldn’t have ever had to move out of my house. And, out of (tough) love for me, my parents made me pick a college and a major and then they kicked me right out of this joint...in a kind and necessary way. And they have supported me financially throughout the whole adventure, which has been most supremely helpful. 

Out of my vanity, I’m just going to assume that my parents wanted to keep me forever just as I wanted to stay with them forever. Both parties in this situation had to show love in a way they didn’t want to. My parents didn’t want to make me leave and I didn’t want to leave. But then we both grow (mostly me; I like to tell people that I blossomed when I got to college) and it was good. I would have remained immature and trivial if I had stayed in my pink basement bedroom and taken high school classes forever (not that I'm never immature or trivial now, but I like to think that I'm less so). When both of us showed that love - the kind that lets go (even though sometimes it doesn't have a choice), we both benefitted in ways we didn't know was possible until we actually did the letting go. 

However, once you let go of something you love, you can still be friends! Generally, just because things have to change doesn’t mean they have to permanently end. And that is a nice thing to know.

Instead of being discouraged by knowing that you have to let go of pieces of your heart, find happiness and hope. Giving away pieces of your heart and loving in a let-go kind of way is like a flower girl in a wedding, and, although it's nicer to have all of the petals organized and consolidated in one central place (the flower girl's basket), once the petals have been scattered by her all over the church floor, the petals are spread out and the whole church is full of beauty and flowery fragrance. The entire church being scattered with flower petals is better than all of them in one specified place, and it's the same with love. 

If you love a person, why would you not tell them? (within reason – stalkers and other creepy situations don’t count) and why would you not tell them often? 

Let love be an bubbly fountain in your heart, because then you can never run out. Don't be a love-Grinch. 

This is quite, quite easier said than done: take it from a girl who cried (and by cried, I mean sobbed my poor, tortured eight-year-old heart out) when she had to throw away broken shoes. It’s so much easier and more convenient to be clingy and stingy and keep things forever, even if they’re broken and if it's for the good of the world that they go into the trash can. 

Let's keep it simple. I have a niece (she's not "technically" my niece, but I have claimed her as my niece and she has claimed me as her aunt, so it's real love). She just turned three and she is so beautiful and joyful. She doesn't live in Clemson anymore, but I get to see her when she is here. One of the more recent times she was here, I told her I loved her very much and I'm sure she thought that was very nice but then I realized she may not know what love exactly is. So I told her: "love means that I want to hug you all the time." And she was okay with that definition. So I am, too, and I think that's how I want to define love from now on. 

It means I want to hug you all the time: whether we live in the same apartment complex or on different continents, whether we've known each other since we were born but we never get to see each other now or we just met last August but now we're inseparable, whether I got you a Christmas present or I completely forgot, whether you like Justin Bieber or Dietrich Bonhoeffer (or both). Love is complicated and hard, but no matter what kind of love it is, and no matter if I have to let you go or not, I just want to hug you all the time. 

Love,
Lauralicious