Is it love to be so captivated by the scent of oranges carried on the wind while walking down the street that you are drawn to its source, pluck one, and finally take a bite? After tasting the orange, is it love to declare that oranges are the best thing in the world, fill your house with them, and eat only oranges every morning and evening?
Is it love to eventually, and rather quickly, within a few months, feel nothing and secretly start to get tired of them? While still keeping the oranges around because you’re worried there will be nothing left to eat when you feel a craving?
Is it love to suddenly have your lost appetite violently revived upon seeing strawberries at a chance encounter, and to think about strawberries even after returning home to the oranges? Is it passion, youth, and love to finally give in to your revived appetite and somehow find the time and money to gorge on strawberries?
Is it love to live consumed by strawberries to the point where you don’t even remember when you liked oranges, and then suddenly realize that your appetite isn’t what it used to be and start lamenting your fate, saying that a life without true love is truly miserable? Is it love to taste a banana offered as a snack at a bar one day while trying to soothe your gloomy mood, and then realize, “I’m actually a banana person. I’ve never truly known myself before”?
Is it love to feel that you cannot live a single day without oranges or strawberries, only to have those times seem as if they never existed, and then become completely immersed in the strange aroma and sweetness of the newly discovered banana, feeling, “Yes, I’m still alive”?
Is it love to meet someone you are attracted to, someone you like? Is it love to finally taste the person who constantly floats in your thoughts? Is it love to approach someone, packaging your craving as love, and then enduring anything to experience their sweetness? Or is it love to cleverly exploit someone’s temporary cravings for your own gain?
The reason human love is sad and pathetic is that it mistakes something similar to a craving for oranges or strawberries as love. It’s because someone’s impulsive cravings are cunningly used and, in turn, one is used by them. It’s because two cravings, or a craving and a mind that tries to exploit it, have met, and people deceive themselves by calling that love.
Love is only promise, responsibility, and sacrifice. Thinking, “It looks so sweet, if only I could taste it forever,” is a craving, not love. You can feel such cheap cravings even when seeing a stranger for the first time. Love is when you have the thought: “I want to make a promise, take responsibility, and willingly take a loss and sacrifice.”
We have learned wrong, lived wrong, and taught wrong. Parents have ruined their children, friends have ruined their friends, writers have ruined the public, and we have built a culture where we ruin each other. In the name of culture and art, we have led too many souls to hell. By calling something that is not love, love.
Love is not about eating well or living well. Love is for dying well. Only then can you truly live well. To die well in a life where you never know when you will die, you have no choice but to live each day as if it were your last. If you struggle to live well, you will stray from the path of dying well. Then, you will become unable to love. Perhaps the reason why people nowadays find it difficult to love is because they are all struggling too much to live well. And perhaps because they have become unable to die well.
Leave a Reply