Skip to main content

Love: the ultimate meaning

'Eternal Love' by Carmen Guedez


Love is the ultimate assertion of life. Nothing says ‘yes’ to life more genially than love and nothing renders life more meaningful than a firm ‘yes’ to it. Love is a benign acceptance of the given reality. Once the reality is accepted, it can be transmuted too. Love is a miracle. It can change arid deserts into breath-taking oases. Love is the fairy kiss that transforms the monster into beauty.
Meaning of life is inextricably related to our attitudes. Meaning is an attitude to the given reality. Reality always demands a response from us. Within my given reality, I must take a stand. I have to live and act within the position I take. I can take the stand of the follower or the leader, optimist or pessimist, sceptic or cynic, whatever. Reality demands a stand.
My stand shapes and colours my experiences, behaviour and action. Those who reached the heights of understanding knew that love was the ultimate response to reality. Love is a divine response, so to say. The Buddha and the Christ, the Mahatma and all genuine teachers of mankind were motivated by the boundless love they bore in their hearts.
When you love someone, you accept that person as he or she is. Your love may transmute that person eventually. That’s also an important factor of love. Love transmutes. Love changes the hell into heaven, the monster into a saint, noise into music.
There is no greater melody than love. Beethoven and Mozart will give way to new geniuses. Shakespeare’s genius will be surpassed by other writers of similar calibre. The Taj Mahal’s resplendence will find its rival in better architecture. Michelangelo and Da Vinci will merge into the miasma of history. The Buddha and the Christ will continue to sway human imaginations. Love has no death.
Love gives you the deepest and the most meaningful relationship with the reality around you, however painful that reality is. Love enables you to listen to the muffled voices of that reality. The breadth of your experience is infinitely multiplied by your empathy with others. Love enables you to suffer with the suffering and rejoice with the joyful, as John Powell said. It gives you a new life every springtime. It makes you feel the impact of the great mysteries of life: birth, growth, suffering and death. Your heart skips along with young lovers and you experience the exhilaration that is in them. You know the ghetto’s philosophy of despair and the sage’s peaks of ecstasy. Love makes flowers bloom on your way and enables you to accept the thorns among those flowers too. Love is the music that moves the planets in their orbits and your heart resonates with the same music.
One of the best passages on love can be found in the Bible: 1 Corinthians 13.  I may be a powerful orator who can speak in the tongues of angels, but I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal if there is no love in my heart. Even if I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all the mysteries and all knowledge, and even if I have faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not self-seeking, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Always. Love is eternal. Perhaps, that is the only eternal thing we have. What better meaning do you want for your life?
  
I am taking my blog to the next level with Blogchatter’s #MyFriendAlexa

This post is the last in a series on Meaning of Life.
The 1st was: What is the meaning of life?
2nd: Religion and Meaning
3rd: Career and Meaning
4th: Science and Meaning
5th: Literature and Meaning
6th: Meaning of Meaninglessness
7th: Meaning of Suffering



Comments

  1. wingsSeptember 20, 2019 at 5:25 PM

    Love is wisdom. Love is not accessible to the materialists. Personally, I have experienced the reward of love after I stopped expecting it from others and started accepting people for what they are and fulfilling their expectations as much as possible. In fact, I have kissed the hearts of several monsters and found the angels in them without any transmutation. What was transmuted was the monster in me into a beautiful angel. Now I am considered an angel by many around me. I can see myself happier than ever. What else will be the reward for love! Thanks, my love!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 21, 2019 at 9:12 AM

      This is the best comment I have received in this whole series. Thank you for that, first of all.

      Touching hearts is the best thing anyone, especially a teacher, can do. That's not easy. We have to let go ourselves. And stop expecting anything in return from others. In fact, the returns may be just the opposite of what we expect. Such is love. But the rewards we reap for ourselves will be great. That's our benefit. I'm glad you've reached that stage.

      Delete
    2. wingsSeptember 22, 2019 at 10:28 AM

      This is the best comment I have received in this whole series.


      What a privilege, sir! Thank you. :)

      Delete
    3. Jacob MatheckenSeptember 23, 2019 at 12:39 AM

      Love is a response thru action..It takes different hues and shapes and meaning ...From one spectrum to the other...As Tomichan illustrated...

      Delete
    4. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 23, 2019 at 8:33 AM

      Thank you.

      Delete
  2. Simrit BediSeptember 24, 2019 at 7:45 AM

    This is a beautiful post.. You have penned down beautifully.. Loved reading it

    ReplyDelete
  3. VidhiSeptember 24, 2019 at 8:05 PM

    Very nice post. And yes love does change people for good.

    ReplyDelete
  4. arushisethSeptember 24, 2019 at 11:04 PM

    What a beautifully written post. Loved it. Love is beautiful!!!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Lakshmi ShajiOctober 8, 2019 at 11:15 AM

    I simply loved this post. In my opinion one must find love in everything around. Love what you do. I think that can give you more positive energy than anything else.

    ReplyDelete
  6. SAN A KFebruary 20, 2020 at 1:58 PM

    But sir, the world has changed to the conclusion that love has no value. What can u contradict between Love and the present Society??

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 20, 2020 at 9:07 PM

      Love will continue to be a human value as long as humanity exists. Right now humanity is in a phase of degradation. The cycle will turn in due course of time.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
37 comments
Read more

Everything is Politics

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics
14 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart
13 comments
Read more

Mango Trees and Cats

Appu and Dessie, two of our cats, love to sleep under the two mango trees in front of our house these days. During the daytime, that is, when the temperature threatens to brush 40 degrees Celsius. The shade beneath the mango trees remains a cool 28 degrees or so. Mango trees have this tremendous cooling effect. When I constructed the house, the area in front had no touch of greenery as you can see in the pic below.  Now the same area, which was totally arid then, looks like what's below:  Appu and Dessie find their bower in that coolness.  I wanted to have a lot of colours around my house. I tried growing all sorts of flower plants and failed rather miserably. The climate changes are beyond the plants’ tolerance levels. Moreover, all sorts of insects and pests come from nowhere and damage the plants. Crotons survive and even thrive. I haven’t given up hope with the others yet. There are a few adeniums, rhoeos, ixoras, zinnias and so on growing in the pots. They are trying their
7 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 comments
Read more