I have been thinking about love. What it is, what it means, how it changes us. Love has one of the most recognisable symbols in the world: the heart. It is the subject of songs and books, plays and poems, paintings, photography, films. The list goes on. Humanity has spent countless hours trying to express and explain the feeling of love. It is an endless inspiration.
A dear friend of mine just got married. She and her (now) husband had to reschedule their wedding four times during the pandemic. On Saturday it finally happened. The love everyone felt that day filled me with wonder and awe. You could see it on every face, hear it in every voice, feel it in the air.
I met Amy in October 2015. I had taken a job as an art technician at Heartland High School in North London and Amy was Head of Drama. Visual and Performing Arts shared a staff room at the school, and almost all of us were women. Among these women were Tessa, Amy and Nikki. For two years we spent more time together than we did with anyone else. We shared the ins and outs of our lives, our hopes, our dreams. We laughed and cried together, supporting each other. Friendships grew, and within them, love.
We happened to leave the school at the same time. Within weeks I had moved to Devon, but I made a conscious and concerted effort to keep in touch with Tessa, Amy, and Nikki. After two years I didn’t want to lose their friendships. Thankfully my efforts were returned, texts answered and invites to dinner every time I was in London met with enthusiasm. Love continued to grow.
The people we love, the relationships we have with them, help make us who we are. Whether these people are in our lives fleetingly or forever, I believe loving someone leaves you changed. It opens you up to new ways of seeing the world, new experiences, new empathies. The things they care about become noteworthy and widen our views of the world. We become richer and fuller human beings because of loving someone.
But it isn’t only people we love. Places, animals, our jobs, objects, art, books, sport, films, we can love them all, and loving them changes us as much as people do. These loves influence who we are, what we want, how we think, and what we care about.
To me it seems that these different loves are interconnected, and that they form a growing cycle. We love a place because we met someone we love there, or we take someone we love to somewhere we love because sharing it makes both loves better. We love an object because it was a gift from someone we love or holds a memory of them. Or we love it because it reminds of a place we love. If we are lucky, we love our jobs, and they are made better by meeting people who love them too. We love books and sport and art and films, and these loves influence us, characters or beliefs expressed within them helping us learn and voice what matters to us.
Not every love lasts forever, but the effect of that love does. It stays with us, the changes it wrought become part us forever there. Without this interconnected loving every single one of us would be diminished.
Celebrating love at the wedding on Saturday reminded me of its power, and its importance in shaping our lives. It reminded me to embrace, celebrate, and revel in the things, places, and people I love. I wanted to this with you all, and I hope you go out and revel in your own loves this week.
I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.
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