The Problem with Love

My first experience with letting go was during my teenage years.  It was my early acquaintance with romantic love, (or in reality, the typical teenage crush), the kind that makes you giddy; the kind without a lot of talking.  Instead the kind that uses a Pink Floyd song like "Wish You Were Here" as a substitute for actual conversation; the kind that is thrilling in its newness and freshness but without any lasting depth.  It coincided with my 16th year.  Though I was old enough to recognize the startling shift in my emotions,  I was too young to give them appropriate weight in the larger context of life.  So what felt like an eternity was in actuality only three months, but no matter, it was forever.

So when the day came when he broke up with me I was unprepared.  I poured over advice columns in 'Teen Magazine, cried on my best friend's bed and wrote tragic poetry.  I staked him out in the high school hallways, while carefully avoiding passing his locker, drove past his house at odd times and watched with a broken heart his new relationship unfold -the one with the older, more worldly girl (if you know what I mean).  I tried to recover.  The only solace I could find was contemplating a saying an older friend passed on to me as she was struggling in her own, more mature love life:  "If you love something, set it free.  If it returns back to you it was meant to be, if not, it never was."  I found some peace.  It was my first memorable practice with impermanence, the conflicts of love and things out of my control.

So now, here I am a few decades later, and without any warning the year of 16 and that sage saying has reentered my mind. It is in that tricky arena of love, all over again, an emotion that masquerades itself as pain, pleasure, fear and longing in equal measures.  I am again being pushed in an uncomfortable direction, but now it is not a crush, nor a romantic love at all.   Instead, it is parental love, love that has grown and magnified over time.  Love, in fact, that is too big to fit into my heart.  Quite oddly, however, the lesson remains the same as the one I learned as a teen.

Though it was not easy to send my oldest off to college, I knew he was ready.  And though I was prepared to let him go on the day I dropped him off, it turns out that that was not the end of the hurdle.  Instead, the challenges keep coming.  In fact, I recently found out he is not coming home for spring break.  He is doing that thing that millions of other kids do his age.  He is driving south, staying up late, and visiting the beach.  It sounds like a grand old time if you aren't the worried parent.  In this moment that I should be celebrating with him his independence, self reliance and quest for adventure, I am instead cautioning him.  "Are you sure you want to go?"   "Route 95 is so dangerous."   I cross a line with my fear.  I am ruining his excitement.   Rationally,  I know this but my emotions, again,  are like magnets, crowding out intellectual debate. But this time I should know better.  As it has many times before, the realization that things are really out of my control slowly sinks in.  To think that it was ever different, that we are capable of managing this gigantic life force, is just an illusion.

But this is what love does.  It pulls and pushes us in places we don't want to go and, yet, we willingly love again and again in a million different ways.  We add people, pets, causes and projects to our lives at great risk to our own fragile natures.  We nurture them.  We care for them.  We invest in them.  They became a piece of us that we are driven to protect at all costs.  Inextricably they become the meaning, the pleasure and the pain. Of course, therefore, there is no alternative.  In order to live, we must love and let go, love and let go, love and let go.

So once again, 20 odd years later, as I resort to the fatalist saying, If you love something you must set it free...

I realize I still need practice.