Beneath the Bodhi Tree

I find myself in the most remarkable position of being able to feel the depths of my emotion without allowing it to influence my actions. True, it leaks through; my facial expressions are different when I'm happy than what I'm sad, and I perhaps am more waspish than normal when stressed, and I tend to eat comforting foods when down (like, for example, cheap Americanized Chinese food), but I have done a great deal in trying to be unhampered by the 'soft weak things' that make up our humanity. This divorce, if you will, enables me to pick part my emotional processes and intuit more things about myself than perhaps I would be able to. It also prevents me from becoming an emotional wreck even after watching 'The Notebook' (one of my weaknesses as a teenager!).

Most of the time, my emotions don't cause me much grief. However, there are moments when my processes become circular, and I reach a point where my emotions constantly recoil and self-perpetuate, unable to solve a fundamental equation or divine a specific answer. One of the most common cycles for me deals with love. I in many ways, accept the beauty of love and all of the wonderful things it can do. I have written fairly extensively that love is a positive thing for many, many people and it is a feeling we should seek in some ways throughout lives. However, what I notably do not often write about is how I feel when I love. It is a personal subject that has little place in becoming actualized into words, but perhaps it is fitting to exposit upon it for a little bit. If only to understand more of what I am deep down.

Love is a selfless and selfish emotion. I was rather abruptly shook out of a rather lovey-dovey feeling by a friend who proceeded to find me that attraction oftentimes had more to do with what people could do for one another than it did any sort of 'higher' feeling. Is love simply a collection of selfish desires we see becoming fulfilled by someone else? Is this why many relationships fail when one person fails the expectations of another? How can this be the high ideal of romantic love if it too embodies a sense of self-preservation and want? More and more as I grow older, I find myself grappling with the object more and more; this conscious desire of certain aspects and yet, this incredibly overpowering feeling of guilt surrounding them. To want something is in some ways, the worse crime. To want someone, could it be myself perverting something that could be far more beautiful?

Though it is human to desire, and it is futile to aim for something 'not human' as an end, I do not believe the journey towards transcending human limits is one not worth undertaking. To love everyone and everything equally perhaps requires a grace I do not have and will never have, but to endeavor is a worthwhile goal to me. Such things always require a price or toll to pay, and I feel that I stand at an impasse. Shall I do nothing about my own desires and live and want as much as others,or should I try consciously eliminate them one by one, until I have not want for anything any longer? I wonder if Siddhartha, as he sat below some tree of some kind or another, felt the twinge of sadness for even wondering such a thing, for even contemplating the idea that to be human somehow is something undesirable.

One thing's for certain. It's time to say good-bye. I'm not a child anymore, nor can I afford to continue to attempt to be.

Today is cloudy, but no rain, but it's still gloomy out. Therefore, I am lazy.

Cheers.