Getting Ahead of Myself

I think the first few hours we spend with someone new gives us a glimpse of the possibilities of unconditional love. Wouldn’t you agree? Hypothetically, you were travelling and you meet a complete stranger and something inexplicable happens. You look at each other from across the room and you are somehow pulled to each other by this invisible magnetic force. I think this moment is when your souls shake hands, perhaps even in recognition. It is pretty phenomenal when you think about it. Every little thing that happened prior led you to that moment just as every little thing that happened to the other person led him to that moment. If either person did something differently, perhaps made a teeny tiny different choice that day, you wouldn’t even have met. Isn’t that crazy?

But you did. And you’re both there.

There are no exchange of words. They are not necessary. Something in you knows just as something in the other person knows. I say that this is when unconditional love becomes possible because at this moment, you don’t know a single thing about this person. You know not what the other person does for a living, what he went to school for (or if he even did!), how much he makes, what car he drives, his psychological profile, yadda yadda yadda. You absolutely don’t care. There is no reason to. What matters there and then is the warm, cozy, comfortable feeling, and how you feel very alive at that moment. Pure, sheer, unrestricted, mindless presence. Oh how utterly simple and uncomplicated this moment is. You bask in how refreshing it feels like floating on clear, cool water on a hot summer day. Or like free falling from the sky. Efortless. Natural. Gravity.

And then an interesting thing happens. If you are aware enough, you will know the instant this happens. Suddenly, the mind takes over. And it’s gone. Kaput. Finito. The second you allow your mind to rationalize and meddle, you’ve lost it. Your mind starts to rationalize and understand what is incomprehensible. And it will hold on with a death grip. It will not let go. It will attempt to define it, put labels around it. It will cling and attach. It will get greedy and want more of this, whatever this indefinable thing is, that makes you feel so heady and alive. And the mind tells you to step on the brakes. It daunts you with all these questions. Then it turns from unconditional to conditional, i.e. you will only like this person now if he does this or that, if he makes this much money, if he fits in your description of acceptable.

Sometimes I wonder what kind of f*ckery this is.

Granted that all these things are important if we are seeking for relationships with higher probability of success. Experience teaches us that certain characteristics and personality traits in some people are just not a good fit for ours. So you discern. You discriminate. You eliminate.

Unconditional loses its prefix and mutates into conditional.

And I suppose that’s okay. That's how things are done around here, right?

Must it be so?