Once More, With Feeling...

So here I am, back to blogging, and the best part of it is, as I read my intro to this blog, I realized that I’m writing here again for the very same reasons: I’m in Bangladesh for the summer, and I desperately need a medium to relieve myself of the stress and drama that being around my parents necessitates. And once more, with feeling: Good times! But I guess all sarcasm aside; this summer has really taught me a few things. Maybe when I’m feeling less de-motivated or stressed, I’ll get around to writing about all these great life lessons. For now, I’m just going to rant (yeah, it’s that time of the month! Who’da thunk it?) about something that’s been rattling around this hardly used brain of mine.

I think I’ll start by rephrasing the old adage from boys will be boys to kids will be kids. And so shall we all be. Kids, I mean, not boys. I guess what I’m saying in my usual haphazard manner is that we’re all really children inside. We all crave the same kind of love and attention throughout our lives that we’re born needing as babies: starting from that first breathy, lung-busting, heart-wrenching cry of a newborn to our final shaky, equally lung-busting, probably heart-wrenching breath before a hopefully peaceful death. We spend our entire lives looking for love. Whether it’s the love of a parent, sibling, friend, partner etc. what we want from each and every relationship is love. There are those who claim to have no need for it, and there are those who claim they are done with it after the first time they’ve been dumped, and then there are those who give it endlessly and are hurt when it’s not reciprocated. Let’s face it, the first two groups are liars, and the latter group is just plain, excuse my French, stupid.

When you say you don’t need love, you’re not only lying to another person, you’re lying to yourself, because deep down, all you really want is for that person to overlook the words and realize that you’re a person in need of love. When you say that you’re done with love, you’re just foreshadowing the fact that you will be made to eat your words in a very near future, because you will fall in love again. More importantly than this, when you give love, and you secretly hurt because you feel it’s not returned, there are several things you need to notice: what’s the other person like? Are they likely to display their affections outwardly in words or actions? Think about this before you start wallowing in self-pity that the object of your affections doesn’t love you back. Maybe they do it in their own way. Figure out what that way is.

When I was a child, my father always told me that a parent’s love is always unconditional. But I’ve never believed him. Even now, I find it difficult to believe that anyone can love unconditionally. Yes, you can love someone deeply: maybe you’re willing to die for your child, or willing to break your back doing physical labor when you’re an arthritic old man, just to be able to feed your children and give them whatever they ask for, or maybe, like my parents, you’re just doing the best you can. That just means you know how to love, and you have a way of showing it. Unconditional is a realm I believe humans have yet to fathom, let alone learn. No one can love unconditionally, because inside, everyone does it for the same selfish reason: to be loved back. Whether it’s a mother continuously cooking food for a son who doesn’t seem to notice or care, or a father refusing to call his children who are abroad simply because he feels that they don’t have time for him, and he wants to give them their space; inside, both these parents just hope that whatever they do, their children will one day realize, and show them some semblance of love back.