July 6, 2001

  • Let’s say you lose in love.  No particulars or details required.  Not that you lose your gf, bf, wife, husband, or dog.  Not that love digs a hole and you jump in and are obliged with a common burial.  Simply: you love and you lose. 


    What normally follows?  Disbelief?  Soul-searching?  Self-pity?  Self or other-party recrimination? 


    Yes, these often occur under such circumstance.  But what do you carry away with you?  What remains either as salvage or as consolation? 


    Chogyam Trungpa, Buddhist spiritual advisor, once spoke of such things in life as contributing to “one’s manure pile of experience” -- a heap of waste experiences that serve as nutrient to upcoming endeavors. You might reply: “That’s a pile of crap.”  Precisely!  Nurture that crap and spread it about in your field of yet-to-be-sown living, then watch as your magic beans grow skywards.  (Well—that’s just me, I’m getting beanstalk-adventure happy.)   But Trungpa would say not to flush away the manure in a ceramic sewer system of forgetfulness, but keep it handy, for in its ripeness there is fertility.


    Thomas Merton, monk and modern mystic, spoke thus of love: “Love is its own reward.”  To lose in love may be to lose (or, in some sense at least, not fully embrace) the intended object of love, be it a person or even a dream.  But to lose the intended object of embrace is not to lose love itself--which according to Merton is the very reward.  The movie Ghost has the ghost of a murdered lover, played by Patrick Swayze, professing to his living girlfriend (Demi Moore) as he departs the earthy realm for immortal light, “The love--you take it with you.” 


    These things, I feel, are all true.


    So “losing love” may not be as fatal as it usually first seems to the recently-smitten.  Less so, I say, if in losing in love, you gain in health.  Which was precisely my course  of action in the aftermath of a once fledgling affair with …hrm, let me concoct some initials…J.A.S. (She was a soulmate-to-be for sure, but betrayed me via an "et tu Brutus" harassment charge in order to trophy an affair with the president of the organization.) Though I lost by all accounts, I ran--literally.  Like Forest Gump, I ran--sometimes running as blindly as my love was blind.  I didn’t run primarily for health but out of a desperation to find some meaning in the foremath and a trapdoor from the aftermath of the whole matter.  I found some meaning and I found at least one trapdoor, but even if I had found nothing along the lines of these quests, I ran myself into incredibly good shape.  Not that I was in bad shape to start, but I was in unquestionably buff-better shape at the finish. 


    So if love is its own reward (and you take it with you) and health is the key to happiness, if you run yourself (figuratively or literally) through the well-ploughed and then manure-rich fields of apparent emotional devastation and into the heart of health itself, what, if anything, have you really lost?

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