clear your head for a moment

Last night as I rode home - leaving Cleveland for the last time for 3 months my thought suddenly became clear as day. I even stopped my bike to talk them through with myself. The overarching theme of my thoughts landed with the fact that we are always changing.

Actually it started with me thinking about love (not unusual I know). I was thinking about how I love my friends, and family, and significant others, but how can we really love someone forever. We have a fascination with happily ever after long term love linked to long term marriage. It’s the American fairy book ending shoved at us every-time we enter the subway or

I will now crush my own hopelessly romantic dreams with one assertive statement. I think that it is impossible to love someone forever. I do believe, though, that we are capable of being in love with someone on a day to day basis.

Our interactions with people, books, TV, internet, animals, nature, and ourself constantly challenge and reaffirm our values and beliefs. Even a week after meeting someone they have already began to change and be a more complex person. This is because of the constant outside forces that make us excited about something, or turned off to something. Even something we once really liked could become something we no longer enjoy overnight. We constantly have to keep up with our own changes and the changes of those whom we love.

We know who we are and that possibly changes every single second. Sometimes we are affected by a change and we don’t know who we are for a while. I am not writing about huge life changing events and decisions, but instead about very small, simple unseen changed that build up over time. These small changes make us who we are. These changes educate our political leanings, what words we use, what we talk about, what we strive for, our passions, and much more about our personalities and lives.

Take this example:
You are sitting drinking coffee with your lover, one second everything is fine but in the next second things seem to have changed. We often talk about not having seen things coming when something bad is said or done to us. I think this is a flaw of mankind. Of course we are creatures of environment and we react to stimulus from others, so it is easy to blame one specific thing for another specific thing. But, I believe that the small moments right before a decision is made or something bad happens do not affect the person enough to be counted as influential. In some cases it is true that the moments before a decision is made are used for deliberation. In which case, those are critical moments. The point is, no one thing changes everything. Instead it is a bunch of small things that add up over time, until they become something.

It takes a lot of work to be in love, let alone to be in love forever. It’s a lot of pressure to know your partner so completely to reaffirm that you should be together forever. We have to be open and ready for the minor little changed that we don’t see in our significant others. We have to be ready for surprises, and quick to adapt. We have to understand we are changing as well, and it is okay to change or mind or stance about something. Communication from small spark to small moment is crucial. Living from one big moment to the next means we lose sight of the development and miss a lot about the person.

I am not going to say it is easy to know about the little moments. I am not aware of all my little moments. The effort to see what’s going on inside of a person and to be truly open so they can see you too is complicated and frightening. But it is only then when you are living for the moments and from the small moments can you truly be in love with someone, instead of being in love with the person you met.



The picture at the top is a shot of my window early last September
I thought it was fitting to my overall mood