Consciously or unconsciously we all seek pleasure, joy, happiness and fulfillment. Life sustains those who have the courage to pounce on it with attention and interest. But the counterpoints of suffering, pain, sadness, fear, frustration, emptiness, boredom and bitterness also exist. Where is the safe haven, the great love that will always make us happy and the professional realization to justify our efforts with? Are they all just pipe dreams, mirages, sweet illusions that life is bound to destroy?
Those who seek permanence, stable ground, will realize that life floats over water. Inside a boat one false movement will cast you overboard. Life does not let us rest for long. It is tireless. It always demands of us new efforts. The sweetness of new things, the enchantment of discovery is followed by an ocean of repetitions. The new becomes familiar, normal, enjoyable, but without the explosive intenseness of being really new.
Such creativity, incessant searching, necessary in order to reencounter with the new, with discoveries and the intense freshness of beauty that reveals itself before us as we grow older, throughout the decades of life that go on accumulating in our memory and in our bodies. Who does not do this, failing in this effort, grows old and finds the sad stability of the defeated, of the bitter, the depressed, of those who think that life is just one big illusion, that it is all out of vanity, that happiness and love aren’t any more than unachievable desires. Negative stability is easy. It’s very common to find people, mainly middle aged, in their forties, who are firm, stable, and secure within sadness, boredom, discouragement and dryness. They feel empty, discouraged and think that their time to be happy has passed, expecting nothing from the decades to come.
Life demands from us a whole lot of ambition, a gold digger’s attitude. The eagerness to dig up a ton of earth to find one tiny gold nugget. If we are capable of having this kind of attitude, we will surely not grow old. The body takes in its years, but the childish joy of discovering the world can still be ours.
There are people who permanently embitter because they did not find that their erotic love life is what they dreamed it would be. Who were once in love and after years of living together, he who once was her prince charming is now a source of constant disappointment. Even two people who loved each other dearly, who were greatly happy together for months or years can one day discover that love is not enough, that living together in an intimate day-to-day relationship brings about certain issues, impossibilities of coexistence, which suffocate and stifle the sweet and intense love of the relationship’s early years.
Does this mean that true love does not exist? Does this mean that everything was just a dream that didn’t stand up to the test of reality? The fact of the existence of true love between a man and a woman does not mean that this love is enough to resolve all difficulties, conflicts and incompatibilities that everyday coexistence implies. Love can be true but it does not have unlimited potency. Maybe live together less, maybe live in separate houses, or maybe to end the relationship is inevitable. Is this a failure of love? Yes and no. I was happy with someone, intensely and profoundly, or maybe in a sweet, gentle and calm way, for one year, five years, ten years and it is a love that bore fruits, precious stones of joy forever alive inside of me.
Love can last not only in the permanence of the couples’ routine life, but also in the gratefulness to someone with whom I was happy with for months or years. It may not be a passionate and erotic love any longer, but it can survive as a close friendship or just as a good will that survives within us at a distance, a mix of gratitude, joy and the sadness for not lasting as long as we would like.
For us to live ‘happily ever after’ we need to conserve the willingness to start over. Will a new love appear? Maybe … But only for those who have the willingness to joyfully enjoy what life has to offer, what each person can bring us, joy and comfort – hours, days or months of living together happily. Whether lasting days or years, each new love can make us ‘happily ever after’, remaining alive within us, if we know how to extract the venom of frustrated desire, of disappointment, of the pain of loss and abandonment.
If there is no new love and we conserve the attitude of the gold digger, we can discover new people, books, music, activities, tours, films, which for hours, days or months can give us little nuggets of joy and delight. Life is flux, unstable, varied, and full of bumps in the road, always in motion. Our lasting joy will come from our ability to always start over with love and passion in our eyes.
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