The Misplaced Treasure
An unknown force, whose name never ceased to be debated since the beginning of human time, conceived me. Other forces shaped me and taught me how to pursue the journey. Among all the things with which these forces fed my brain since this latter started to understand the language of advisors and councilors, one thing was more present than the rest: love, and especially the love between a man and a woman, its beauty, the desire of each person to know it, feel it and experience it. The discussions about love revolved also around the stage of pre-love and what it involves from longing and anticipation and the phase of post-love with all its sadness and despair! My brain was filled with stories and legends about this central topic of love, and once I was convinced that there was not much left for me to learn from listening to people, I embarked on my own search for love and its true nature.
Fairly quickly I discovered that people first encounter with love happens before they even know the meaning of words. At this age, their brain functions only in extreme necessity. People don’t remember how old they were when love touched them for the first time, as time at this age didn’t have the same importance as it does later in life; they only remember that they were very young. This love is a feeling of security and restfulness that is hard to describe today with adult words. During this time, love is their daily nourishment. The beauty of this love and its uniqueness, when it exists, lie in its constant presence next to everyone who lives it, without disappointment, without expectation of reciprocation and always growing stronger. This love is universal, every human needs to taste it, or they will forever live looking for it. It is a fundamental and eternal love, there is no before it, nor after it. It dies with the last breath of both people who live it. Its quality defines the quality of entire nations and generations. From this unending love, people draw their strength and this tender love accompanies them in a reassuring quietude towards their adolescence and during all their lives.
Teenager years are few but charged with discovery, change and struggle. The discovery of new problems, more difficult than the ones of the past; changes in the body and the mind; and a struggle between the child and the man or woman who is developing in us. From these three factors, is born a new form of love, the love of the first Eve or Adam! With this love ends the era of tender and simple tranquility and starts the period of earthly struggles.
The teenager love is natural, simple, frank and innocent; and this makes it special and different. The stage of pre-love is beautiful and deprived from any hypocrisy. The one and the other perceive their mutual feelings and express them with their innocent means drawn from their experience as children. Their aim is not to trap the other, or to make them jealous, but rather the shy expression of beautiful and disturbing emotions they are feeling for the fist time in their lives. Since they haven’t yet learnt from their adults how to invest and abuse these feelings, the latters are given with a marvelous and natural simplicity. This period of pre-love can last anywhere from days to months, depending on the social environment they live in, in any case it is without a doubt the sweetest and most tender period of all.
One day, the one or the other assembles enough courage and declares their love to the other one. In a matter of seconds, they tip into a love relationship, which in this instance is not very different from the previous phase, excluding the physical relation between the two adolescents and the change in their attitudes towards each other. The source of this change is the courage that pushes them to use words to express their love to each other. They have never before faced such difficulty. As kids, when they wanted to express their love to someone, they jumped on their lap or they hugged them and kissed them. Now, they are facing this unconscious feeling of inhibition, mainly born from all the stupidity they were told by their parents, or their teachers, or any frustrated adult they had the unluck to meet. They are unable to explain this inhibition, it bothers them, but it is there. Suddenly, the innocence starts to give way to defiance. Suddenly, the simplicity slips away and leaves its place to complexity.
In most cases this love ends in an unpredictable way, without many complications or headaches. The girl at this age evolves much quicker than the boy. She gets out of her girlish feelings to become a woman, whereas he remains a boy few more years. So, they part without heart feelings, each looking towards their future, with young eyes defying love and time. This love, in most cases, leaves only good memories that stay with both of them all their lives. This love inherits a lot from its predecessor (filial love), especially in its gratuity and lack of impossible demands from the other. We cannot help notice, the smallness of this love relative to the previous one. The importance of teenager love is more or less limited to two people, it is not a necessary love, many didn’t experience it in their adolescence and yet they pursued their journey with a sane and sound mind. To finish with adolescence, I will share an important thought on this love: it is the last love where we can still talk about love (in the rest of this paper we will refer to this state of being as “love relations”); it is also, for most people, the last love that involves primarily the two lovers, and only them!!!
Towards twenty years old we become adults. What does it really mean to become an adult? More or less it means: “to become conscious and responsible of the consequences of our words and actions towards the people who surround us, the society that hosts us and ourselves”. Unfortunately, most people replace the last part of this definition starting with the word “towards” by: “… towards ourselves!” Transforming the meaning of the word adult into: “the ability to autonomously do what benefits us, without worrying too much about the impact of our actions on other people”. This semantic introduction is necessary to better understand the “love relations” between two adults.
The period that precedes this “love relation” is in general a series of preparations to reach the moment where the two lovers reveal their “secrets” to each other. It is a period of strategy and tactics worthy of the most famous tacticians (Chess Masters, War Generals, etc.) in history. It is also a phase of intense promotion and negotiation on the love market.
Firstly, we need to study the other: their environment, their habits, their vulnerabilities, their preferences, their needs, their past experiences, … and for that we use questions, jokes, alcohol, friends, provocations, facebook, twitter, … everything that can help us win over their hearts!
Secondly, we need to put in place the method and the means that allow the fastest achievement of the goal. The most important is to reach the “Point of No Return (PNR)”, from which love will flow naturally. This requires commercial finesse, because to ensure the success of a commercial transaction, you have to invest to impress: dinners, galas, jewelries, flowers, perfumes, weekends, etc. Then the crafty salesperson knows that the best way to make the transaction happen is to push the other party to make equivalent investments in the same deal. Thus, the sums engaged from both sides incite them to maintain the efforts necessary for the success of the transaction. Finally when the mutual investments and efforts reach the “sufficient” level, then the PNR is reached and the transaction can be closed with the moral and financial consent of both parties. Lo and behold, love is born!
There remains a list of very specific things that are needed to support this newborn, to provide it with the favorable environment for its development and prosperity. The list is long and varies by couple, but one thing is certain: no love will last without a well-defined list, executed flawlessly to the last insignificant detail.
Contrary to the teenager love, this love doesn’t belong solely to the two lovers. It also belongs to all those around them: parents, siblings, friends, … thus starts the glorious theater play called: adult love, or love relation. In this play, the heroes are the two lovers, then you have talented script writers, the parents and few close friends, one gifted director: society and a large number of spectators. What a scenario! An unbelievable mixture of laughter, crying, fun, boredom, despise, and emptiness. It contains scenes of heroism and dignity, pride and vanity, turmoil and arguments, loyalty and commitment, principles and values, hysteria and jealousy, etc. As the play unfolds, the spectators and the scriptwriters find themselves taken by an unprecedented enthusiasm and a persistent will to take part in the plot, the roles get mixed up, the scenario becomes complicated and the directing impossible. The first act comes to an end!
Thanks to the genius and the insistence of the Director (society) and the eagerness of the spectators to continue the play, they redistribute the roles, the lovers, or one of them, become a spectator, one or two of the spectators become the heroes and the second act carries forward.
In this manner, the acts follow the acts, boring and sickening, and love in this theatrical festival becomes the usherette at the entrance of the theatre.
This ‘adult love relation’ play ends the same way any commercial deal ends. Each of the two parties recuperates what is theirs, according to the terms of the contract. The deal is broken, one winner, one loser, sometimes two winners or two losers. The deals follow the deals, the battles rage and love agonizes! Eventually, each of the two lovers finishes their first journey where the spectators expect them: in matrimony!
Unable to leave any significant memory for humanity, in their eternal quest for immortality, the ex-lovers get married and start a family. They have come full circle, their children will remain for a period of time a living proof of their passage on earth, with a mission to complete the circle of stupidities started by Adam and Eve!
This world is really strange! It combines very naturally the real and the artificial, the deep and the shallow, the sublime and the dreadful, the beautiful and the ugly. Treachery, which is the foundation of this ‘adult love relation’ tragi-comedy, breeds naturally the noblest and purest of feelings: the love of parents to their children.
Does anyone still have any doubt that miracles happen? Is there any bigger miracle than the one that transforms a couple of cheating liars into loving, tender and caring parents?
This life, we accept it from cowardliness, but why does it accept us?
One year follows the other, long and barren of any sort of love, carrying, with determination, the actors towards their last act in life: old age, that ends with death.
Despite all the wickedness that humans might have during their entire life, when the last hour approaches, they become much kinder. I always wondered why is that so? We understand from the sphere of life (see at the end of the article), that with old age and when death approaches, people return closer to the initial starting point, from which everything began, and they draw from it again, what allowed them to start their journey in this life in the first place, love, the real one! This return to the source redefines the quality of the love emanating from the elderlies. With old age, jealousy, competition, physical appearances, egos, envy, greed, etc. lose their importance. How can it be otherwise when they know that they are finally escaping from the mighty master (suffering), to very shortly after meet his master (death)? This last love, the love coming from old people, when it exists (because sometimes after a long life of not loving anyone, people forget how to love), is free from all the parasites of adult’s love, it very much looks like the childhood love, simple, tender, free and asexual. Yet another miracle of life!
My quest has reached its end! I understand now few important things:
Vertical love (up to parents and down to children, or in the name of the father and the son, the vertical part of the cross) is stronger than horizontal love (lovers, friends, … or in the name of the holy spirit). In general, vertical pillars last longer than horizontal beams.
Adolescent love is sweet but unessential.
Love between adult men and women might potentially last, if the fulfilled sexual desire between them is secondary to other feelings and lifetime projects. If the fulfilled sexual desire is the main driver, there can only be short-lived passions, one of the most potent enemies of love. There is nothing wrong with intense and ephemeral passions. Actually, passions, if we can afford them, physically and mentally, are the only way to live our lives fully!
If the sexual desire between two people is not fulfilled, then it remains a primary driver, and this will eventually kill love. The latter will transform into frustration, disgust and contempt, or simply separation (if possible)!
This quest also gave me the clue to why love is called the “misplaced (lost for some) treasure”. When people leave their childhood and wake up to adult life, they lose sight of the real love; they misplace it, only to find it back (for some they never do) when they become old, towards the end of their life. Thus, love, this unique treasure, remains, for most of people’s life, misplaced!
The Sphere of life
The journey of a human being starts and ends at the same place. This place is the same for all humans. What changes is the length of time between the departure and the arrival and how far from this starting point do we spend our lives.
In the above “sphere of life”, after our birth, our childhood trajectory takes us from our starting point to our first “circle of life”, where we define for ourselves a set of values and principles by which we live, we call it a lifestyle. Then, at a certain point in our life, we are faced with an unexpected event, usually creating a shock and shattering our beliefs in our current lifestyle. This shock can take us further away from the truth we were born from, or get us closer to it. We redefine to ourselves a new lifestyle (a new set of values and principles, within a new circle) by which we continue to live. And then, we go round and round, and on and on, with new lifestyles (circles), new events, and new shocks throughout our life. Some of us remain on a single circle until the end; some spend their entire life moving from one circle to another, regardless of all this, our old age trajectory then takes us back from whichever circle we were on, to the starting (and ending) point, where we meet the master of the mighty master, death!