The Burden of Proof – Thoughts on a StormyValentine’s Day

This Valentines day has unexpectedly provided me with significant opportunity to think about expectations, not because I am questioning my own but because I am playing silent observer to those of others. It’s snowing like mad outside and a pink heart shaped balloon, lost by someone’s Valentine, just flew by my window. This is one day out of three hundred and sixty five that is designated especially important to those who are in love. I am not at all sorry to say that I just don’t get it.

Why do we weigh down love with the burden of expressing it in a mere twenty four hours? Love is not a chore nor is it something that needs to be proved. We spend so much time “shouldering” each other that we forget that we are all connected and that love is what binds us! It’s a beautiful reality and one to be remembered and trusted not on one day a year, but everyday.

I spent this afternoon with my mom, a person whom I love not for what she does for me or for how she it, but for the person she is independent of me. In comparison with the more elaborate Valentine’s day plans of certain people in my life, my spontaneous and laid back afternoon spent cuddled in the empty movie theater with my mother would seem loserish and pathetic. There was no elaborate display of affection designed to prove that we think only of each other – rather there was an effortless coming together of two people’s lives for a few hours and a equally effortless parting of ways. That is what love is, being fully your own person, so much so that you allow others to be fully themselves, without the pressure of your desire burdening them.

I am sitting here, typing away at my computer, watching the city outside my window and feeling love course through my form, fully realized in my writing. In this moment, I want nothing from anyone and expect nothing. I have fallen in love with others and I have fallen in love with myself, to the eventual realization that the latter kind of love is the more lasting.

So on this year’s Valentines day, there will be no mournful bemoaning of my single status, but another day spent living my life and inviting others to live their own irrespective of my actions or what I think they should do. It’s quite liberating and I find that in allowing and letting go I have more energy than ever before to find any ol kind of love I like, literary, motherly, romantic, poetic, you name it.

What a beautiful day.