Humans Are Loving Creatures

Humans are full of love. full of empathy at their core. they were born to love, not to hate. the state of hate costs a man more than loving ever could, loving prospers, hate drains. you can feel this in the texture of any given day. the meaning you pull from it, the power you feel inside it, it traces back almost always to the love you’re carrying. for a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a lover. a man is full of those emotions.

But then life happens. disappointments accumulate. and what was open begins to close. people grow more protective of love, more guarded about sharing what they feel inside, because giving your heart to someone, loving something fully, means accepting the risk of absence. and that absence hurts. it makes us more careful. more prone to emptiness. and from emptiness, more prone to something that starts to look like hate, it can extend to extremes of negative image of the self.

And that costs us everything. tiredness in the body, lost interest, emotional distance, coldness. that coldness then becomes confusion, feeling trapped, lost, anxious, disconnected, spent, maybe longing with no direction, burnouts arrive without warning. all of it traces back to the same root: love is not part of the day. it is not in the room.

I see this a lot between brothers more recently. men who grew up in different cities, learned to be self reliant and independent in almost every aspect of life, who move through the world not knowing why something feels missing. not knowing it is love. I remember being in one of the university clubs during an anniversary and sending this message to people around me:

Call your mom or dad, tell them you love them, or just ask them how they are. you will be lucky if you have one of them alive or both. it’s a beautiful time to fill with memories. while everyone is just celebrating the end of the year, keep searching for the people you knew this year. see how they are.

I have always suffered from not feeling the love that was surrounding me . but I was constantly reminded of it when I took these small steps, sending a message, asking about someone, and then feeling embarrassed by how much they loved me back, while I just stood there, feeling nothing but numb. living in my head and never feeling connected to anything outside it.

But once someone tries to feel the love, once they stop living entirely in their head, once they stop self isolating and fighting everything to feel present, they might be lucky enough to taste what it is like to live. what it is like to feel the love that was always there, waiting.