Everything Under the Sun

March | Love and Relationships |   Week 12 | 3/26/2023 What fears do you have about love and how will you address them?  Despite the tantalizing appeal of a loving relationship, preemptive fear tends to creep in and metastasize with ease. While most fear is irrational, the mechanism at its origin developed for a reason - protection. But some fear is rational, overwhelmingly justified by the millennia of memory it arose from. Being honest with myself, my fears about love and relationships are some combination of the two; rational and irrational. Say I met someone tomorrow, and feelings of affection and care entered my consciousness shortly thereafter. Feelings of endearment evolve into love. And that love manifested the desire for a relationship. As I introspect, forecasting the future and deciding whether this person is right for me, I try to inject objective rationality into the fusion of potent emotions in my forebrain and in doing so, I come to understand my greatest fear -...

March | Love and Relationships |   Week 11 | 3/19/2023 What are the critical learnings from the spectrum of your relationships? In the realm of all human experience there are learnings to be gained, some cliché and quickly transmissible, others which have a long and arduous aging process. Love, heartbreak, and the capacity we have to oscillate between the two, contains a remarkable wealth of wisdom, one which should be carefully analyzed and reflected upon by any individual seeking self-actualization. I've covered these two extremes and what it feels like to experience both, but have yet to delve into the learnings one can obtain existing in a relationship - in the indeterminate space between two extremes. The day to day, month to month living. The good nights and bad. The courting process, the honeymoon phase, the Sunday errands, Wednesday long-day-at-work and Friday alcohol-induced argument. Since age 16 I've collectively spent 6 years in relationships, about 50% of the time ...

March | Love and Relationships |   Week 10 | 3/12/2023 Explain what heartbreak feels like The eloquence and imagination that I can offer to a subject such as this is no match for the generations of songwriters, poets and artists who've labored over its depiction - a labor of love in the most ironic way. I stand atop a bedrock of sorrow and solitude, attempting to add one small stone to the coagulation of experience that forms the collective articulation of heartbreak. I have felt heartbreak, deep in my bones as one does. I have suffered the 'equal and opposite reaction' inherent as a risk of passionate love. I have inhabited the hellish corners of my mind, conjuring up conclusions and rationalizations. I have dipped a toe into that dark ocean of madness present at the shoreline of every heart that breaks. "Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness," Max Ehrmann writes. Heartbreak is a diving board into fatigue and loneliness.  There is no succinct way to desc...

March | Love and Relationships |   Week 9 | 3/5/2023 Explain what it feels like to fall in love  I have known the soul-satisfying, vigorous embrace of love twice in my life. I've spent years, rooted to this Earth by the intoxicating belongingness of it's gravity. I've witnessed the infinite waterfall, seen and felt the intensity with which it unendingly bellows. I have fallen in love. And as part of the journey of finding love, I've been brushed by ephemeral vibrations of a feeling so close, yet so lacking, half a dozen times more. Like photons passing through me - ungraspable and therefore unsatiating - those near misses are dichotomized by enchantment and despair.  The search for love is ubiquitous and universal. It is the oldest and most fundamental building block of our sociology. It staves off death. It quells existential angst. It is indefatigable. It is the search for the Fountain of Youth, the Riches of the Flor de Mar. It is the religious instinct. It is Romeo ...