January 10, 2013

• Old Post: Tuesday February 5, 2008

  Going through my old archives and ran across this:

  Tuesday February 5, 2008
  Life: I am father of one child, Jasper. Parent to two, Jasper and Bobbie, and a distant figure to a third. Husband of almost one year and friend to my wife, Phae, for almost 2. I am a professional husband, so to speak. I stay at home, mind the kids, take care of household affairs and try to keep it clean as I can, although at the moment it is undergoing a minor transformation and is thus a wreck because of my cleaning methods. My wife is a soldier of the US Army and is currently deployed to Iraq. Being an ex-soldier myself, and a vet of two deployments, it is not as hard on me as it would be for someone who doesn’t understand what happens over there. I don’t worry. If fate claims her it was meant to be, I will move on. But she is not in a situation where she I am especially worried for her. Convoys worry me. Iraqi mortar fire is a joke and one has the same chances of getting struck by lightning as getting hit with one of their mortars, only difference is they lob them a lot more frequently then lightning bolts generally strike the same area. In my two deployments, the closest I have come to getting hit by an explosive blast was when my FOB came under friendly tank fire and it strafed the outside wall of our residence area. Kinda, sad that the closest I have come to being blown up was from our own people giving the wrong coordinates to a tank. Not to say that there is not risk in being over there just that her job does not put her in the middle of most of it. Because she maintains a site convoys are kept to a minimum and it is my opinion that IED’s are the biggest threat to our troops over there.

  Overall I have a high degree of satisfaction with my life. The largest source of displeasure comes from pondering the past four years and realizing that I am not nearly as spiritually adept as I would have liked to be or could have been. Truth be told, I have been slacking and every opportunity I had to try and further myself was usually spent trying to sleep or game. Both necessary things to me but I could have found at least ten minutes to an hour out of the day to do the exercises required to deepen my spiritually. That is my current rut. I have been trough most of the theory and thinking. Now that it comes to doing, I falter. My life is still richly lived for the most part but I hate regret yet I have the regret that I would not DO the meditations or mental exercises. It is not that I couldn’t, I am quite adept at anything I decide I would like to do. Procrastination, and perhaps a twinge of fear of being wrong have kept me from advancing myself. *Smiles* My wife has gotten scared recently because I posted about my dissatisfaction with the way I have behaved over the past 4 years; my dissatisfaction with my spiritual and intellectual growth. I have tried to tell her that I am happy and I don’t intend to leave her but she has had a hard life and gets paranoid quick. A couple of her old friends who she thought had found their soul mates have decided recently to get a divorce after 8 and 10 years of marriage, and this has her apprehensive about the possibility that I might leave her. A friend of the family has also recently decided that she would like to get a divorce from her husband after 5 years of marriage. So many people falling apart deciding that they don’t love each other anymore or have fallen out of love. Not many people truly understand love. What it is. Where it comes from. How it develops. I think that shall be my topic for my Ramblings of a Lunatic section for today.

  Ramblings of a Lunatic: Love, elusive and mysterious to most and understood by few. So many different types of love and levels. Love for one's children, one's parents, one's friends. Love between lovers, husband and wife. Love expressed as compassion for strangers and empathy toward that which makes one's heart cry. Its twin sister sadness always around with its soft embrace to blanket the heart in sorrow. So what is love? Is it a chemical reaction that takes place in the brain? Is it some unbridled force that can’t be controlled and we are left at its mercy; we are just left to take its roller coaster for a ride full of ups and downs, highs and lows, and hope that when the ride is over that we find ourselves in a train ride instead of skipping tracks and plummeting toward certain pain and misery. There are some out there who fear this pain so much that they have killed the ability to love and closed their heats so completely afraid of loss, afraid of pain; nothing ventured, nothing gained. There may be others out there who can explain it better then I and it is possible that there is no right or wrong way to explain it. I can only put it to words as I understand it.

  Love, is born from a sense of connection. Like little strands attached to one's heart that bonds one to the hearts of other people. Pulsating and full of life, when torn suddenly or violently they leave a wound on the heart where the strand used to be connected, a sense of loss. The stronger the strand or bond the more joy felt through experiencing and enjoying the connections one has with someone, but at the risk that when that bond is finally broken the pain from its absence will also be strong. The love of a friend is felt and expressed differently then the love of a family member only in that the relationship is different and thus the bonds are different. As if every thread that connected one to another person had its own color and shade, and these color the way one feels and express one's love of another individual. At the base of it though love is a universal force and is the same, for friend or lover. The only difference is its expression. The bonds between two hearts strengthen when one allows one’s self to be open to attachment. Affection springs from caring about the wellbeing of another. The experiences one shares with another and the memories made can generate affection if those memories and experiences were pleasant. Affection is the building block of the treads we attach to the people around us.

  I guess sharing is the root in the creation of affection and love. If gaming with one of your friends and that is something you like to do, you are creating an experience that is shared between the two of you, memories. If you share a part of your self that you normally keep secret and they accept it with out judgment, you build trust which lessens the fear of being hurt if you truly open up to a person, and thus strengthens the bonds that one normally lessens to some extent out of fear of getting hurt.

  More or less your fondness of the memories creates the bond between you and that person. It defines and colors your relationship in someway. Your trust in the other person allows the bonds you form to strengthen and deepen to new levels of affection. When the memories are just that memories and the no new experiences are being made then, as most things tend to do with time, they fade. As they start to fade so to do your bonds with that person until you experience what many people call falling out of love. The bonds of love must be maintained and watered like a plant to grow and blossom to maturity. Regardless of how it is expressed, between family, friend or lover.

  What does that tell you? If you want to remain in love with your lover, best friends with your best friend, or have a good relationship with your father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, etc.. Then you need to maintain the relationship and bonds by building trust and keeping trust (To allow the bonds to grow to maturity) and by creating new fond memories by doing something you both find mutually pleasing. Remember also that repetition of the same old things is not creating a new memory but trying to capture the feel of the old ones. Sometimes changing things up and getting a new fresh perspective on things is the best way to water the bonds. Doesn’t have to be all the time. Anyway, that is my thoughts on the subject.

  Posted 2/5/2008 at 8:15 AM

   

  Seems I have often been occupied with the concept of Love, full circle so many times.

  • 7:06 pm
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