Love is a Permanent State of the Heart

Once you truly love someone you are never entirely free from that affection.

That may seem a rather surprising statement to make in a blog written by a divorced/remarried man living in a country where the annual divorce rate hovers somewhere between 40 and 50 percent, and according to Project Sanctuary, “on average, nearly 20 people per minute are victims of physical violence by an intimate partner in the United States. During one year, this equates to more than 10 million women and men.” These media-forward statistics paint a pretty bleak picture for the odds for finding love at all, let alone a permanent version of it, not?

But those of you acquainted with my Distilled Harmony worldview will not be surprised to learn that having looked at love from far more than both sides now I, unlike Joni Mitchell, think I have a better way of looking at love.  And it is a way you can actually play along with. First, you need a balloon. I suggest red, but you can use any color you like. It should be a big balloon and a sturdy one because you are going to fill it up with, what else?, water. (So, weather permitting, you might want to do this outside. Inside, maybe the shower.) But these are simply precautions as the balloon is a model of a metaphor and ideally will not be broken. Now fill the balloon, but only maybe three quarters full, tie it tightly. The idea is that you should be able to squeeze the balloon so that it does not break, but mushes out into different shapes. Try it with your balloon - fun, eh?

Now here is the important part. The balloon represents all the love of which you are capable. But it is only a representation - to be an accurate model it would have to be a balloon without boundaries, because our capability to love is infinite.  It is perhaps easiest to understand the balloon model when we apply it to a couple increasing their family. You have this nice round balloon into which pops a child. So squeeze the balloon in the middle until you have a double sphere balloon. The amount of love - which remember is infinite - doesn’t change it just gets reconfigured. And the same thing happens every time a new beloved enters your life. Your love balloon gets squeezed and a new unique configuration occurs. More kids, more lobes. You meet a new precious person, another lobe is added. Sort of like this but with a much bigger balloon and smaller hand:

But adding a new lob is in itself tricky. In part because we aren't really in control. I wrote back in the late 1990s somewhere in The God Chord that we occasionally meet someone who is singularly in sync with our chord - love or lob at first sight. The contrary is true as well. Fingers on a blackboard. Your balloon is unaffected. The heart wants what it wants - not necessarily what your parents, friends, even you think you want.

In a related point, you will note that the model makes no provision for breakage. For lopping off a lob. For falling out of love. That is because I have come to believe that, from a Distilled Harmony perspective, reducing the expanse of love in our lives is counterintuitive.  Again a song; "Once in love with Amy, always in love with Amy." [Ray Bolger 1949] As we look at our love balloon and squeeze it to welcome new arrivals, various portions expand and contract. The conclusion I draw from that is that once we have loved someone we can never totally “un-love” them. We may come to view them through a haze of anger, disappointment, or whatever. But their little nodule is still out there in the love balloon somewhere, and sometimes it become dominant again. Think about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; Elon Musk and Tulah Riley, Eminem and Kim Scott, etc., etc. Think about you own favorite

 married/divorced/married/divorced friends or celebrities. Celebrities really have it rough. Celebrity itself makes everything more difficult - everyone is watching, attributing bizarre motivations to whatever you do, which makes you more prone to do bizarre things. Nice to be in the shadows, exploring our own lobs - old and new, big and little.

James Taylor sang, “Love’s the finest thing around.” Amen, James. And I, looking back over 73 years of children, friends, wives and lovers, feel that we serve love best by remembering and cherishing all those with whom we shared, and still, in some way, share love.