Greater things

I learnt that there must be heart in writing and that good writing has honesty. I also found out that writers do not write in a vacuum, they are and should be grounded by people. I used to have this romantic/disillusioned idea of poets running away into a hut in the wilderness and indulging in a self-consuming form of writing. I now think that is unhealthy because we ought to be surrounded by people, people keep us saint, people remind us that we are part of a social system, people exude love.

But what a strange thing love is, the cliché goes. We can never really pinpoint love, or contain it neatly within fixed boundaries. Love is such a paradox, a double-edged sword in every way. It brings joy but also pain, it may seem eternal yet it could be fleeting, it may deceive yet it could be as real as you would allow it to be. These emotions, responsibilities, and choices that we fit into a word called love is contested at this juncture of life more so than ever. This is a period of trial and error where lovers decide if this is enough to venture to marriage and beyond, a time when singles come up with hypothetical situations and sustains on the characteristics-of-my-ideal. A moment in life’s seventy-eighty years when people struggle in their hazy situation, wanting resolutions, fearing conclusions, desiring answers, denying rejections.

These preoccupations are such priorities right now, and uncertainty makes it so. Soon, the finality of marriage would remove it all and replace such questions with a different set of anxieties, such as bringing bread and butter on the table. But right now, this indefiniteness brings about a restlessness that magnifies the less poignant things in life, it makes the unreal what-ifs real, it feeds on a hope that people hold onto that may turn to disappointment. I'm just hanging onto this:

“I have loved you, my people, with an everlasting love.
With unfailing love I have drawn you to myself."
Jeremiah 31:3

And I guess the best thing that could happen admist such great preoccupations is an awareness of the greater things that could be done...