Your Choice, Your Love

If I could accomplish one thing in the rest of my writing life, it would be to somehow find the way to pin down even a small portion of the the elusive world of feelings that engulf all of us, no matter what our age, situation or health.

I've been a student of emotion for the past quarter-century. Before that, if you had asked me, I would have scoffed at the notion that this realm could in any way compete with the intellectual and physical realities that, until my first mid-life crisis, had consumed all of my energy and attention.

Part of this was due to my profession. In journalism, we were always focused on actions or ideas that could somehow be documented. Emotional issues, by contrast, are by their nature ambiguous and subject to an almost jarring pace of change. Moment to moment, humans experience different emotional states that scientists now recognize are deeply embedded in our brain tissue in ways far too complex to yet document with anything close to scientific rigor.

As a student of the emotional, my main teachers have been women. Why it took me 40 years of living to discover that there was something so critical to my survival that had eluded my restless intellectual curiosity until then I have no idea.

As far as I know, I was not subjected to any kind of deep emotional trauma in my youth. My parents loved me, made me feel special, and the world around me -- though confusing and often very lonely -- didn't seem to notice me enough to inflict any kind of enduring damage.

It is true, however, that I was hit by disease in my youth, and that the authority figures in my life at that time -- my father, our family doctor and others -- blamed my illness on my "laziness." But even this scar cannot have been very deep, because no one has ever repeated that epithet in my adult life, and I also don't think I qualify as any kind of workaholic -- the work/family balance has always been important to me, and even though I've probably worked much longer hours than many of my peers I've never considered my work as my life -- or anything even remotely close to that.

In fact, love and family have always been foremost in my mind. Countless times in the past, I left my jacket on the back of a chair in my office while I raced out to where one of my children was ill or hurt to spend time with them rather than "doing my job."

And, when it comes to love, I cannot imagine that any of my partners could ever have thought that my work mattered more to me than she did -- if so, I must not be much of a communicator after all.

In my long apprenticeship studying feelings, I have noticed how different we all seem to be in how we navigate our way through this most difficult and challenging terrain. Some interpret emotional honesty as holding others responsible for how we feel. Some race away from any uncomfortable feeling like it's the kiss of death. Others misinterpret expressions of pain as an expression that we somehow are incapable of acting the way adults are supposed to act.

I'm not sure how to best express this, but I absolutely do not hold any other person on earth (or departed) responsible for how I feel. When I write in a way that captures emotions that may evoke something in a reader, it is not my feelings that matter in that instant but hers or his.

One small thing I have learned is this: Your heart will tell you how you feel if only you can hear it. Sometimes what it has to say is inconvenient or unexpected. But if you listen hard enough, you'll be able to identify your own true emotions out from the noise of others.

And then you will know the right thing to do, or to say, or (in my case) to write. If honesty hurts, guess what? The world is not always a kind or loving place. Things don't always turn out well.

Love hurts -- that's what every artist in his or her own way says. Love hurts. And so there is no right or wrong schedule for love. Love knows no calendar. Love doesn't spare your deepest fears, nor does it allow you to keep running away from it once it has a grip on your heart.

Love has no beginning, really, and it has no end. Love is fate. No matter how hard we all may try to fight it, we all are always seeking love. There are so many cliches about this that to cite any one of them would trivialize the wisdom they convey collectively.

We all, in good faith I presume, do our best in love. So don't feel bad if you have broken someone's heart. We all do this at one time or another, quite carelessly and seemingly cruelly. But not really.

As long as you listen to your own heart, and let that be your guide, in the end all will be as it ought to be. Our world is imperfect. We are imperfect. Yet love endures.

I suppose the only way to end a post like this is to wish you a happy valentine's day. I remember mine last year, and the joy I took in booking a table at a nice restaurant in this end of town, as well as the love I tried to express to the lovely woman sitting across from me that night at our table.

This year, I will spend that holiday (which frankly causes more harm than good) alone. But that's okay. Because I hold no one else responsible for my feelings -- they are mine alone.

And if I choose to love someone who is gone from me, that is my choice. Or if I choose to denounce and despise the gods of love, that too is my choice. Or, if I harbor hopes toward someone new, that too is my choice.

As it is for you.

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