Overheard: A Conversation about Love ...

The other day I was standing in a checkout lane at the grocery. I was in no particular hurry, and I found myself engrossed in a conversation between two women in line behind me. They were about my age and arguing about love. One woman must have had a terrible experience, because she said, "I'm dee-ohh-enn-eee! I'm DONE with love!" Then she said, "I'm afraid of love!"

The other woman seemed to have it more together, because what she said went something like this: "What do you mean you're done? What are you, stupid? You can't be done with love. And, you're not afraid of love. You're afraid of not being loved."

The first woman just listened. She shook her head back and forth, disagreeing. Her face got red and she started to say something, but she was cut off by the other woman.

"You have to be in love so you won't be by yourself. Ya get it? Naw, you're not afraid of love, you're just angry at how things turned out. You gotta give it some time." Then she gave the fearful woman a hug.

I wish I could say I knew how the conversation turned out, but it was my turn with the cashier. By the time I paid and loaded the plastic bags into my cart, the two women had stopped arguing and were laughing about something else as the cashier rang up their items.

But it made me think: how can anyone be done with love? We are love. It surrounds us and it runs through us. We came from love into this human form to have a human experience. To turn our backs on love would be to deny our very nature. Love is the reason we live. In essence, to be afraid of love is to lose all sense of being alive and, if we can't love, then why have we even been put here? Being afraid of love is like being afraid of ... well, breathing. It's not something to be afraid of. Love is who and what we are and it's as natural as breathing.

Both of the women were actually right. In a loving relationship, love feels wonderful. In in a non-loving relationship, love feels awful -- and if it's abusive, I can see how a person could grow to be afraid of love. A better way to say it might be to say that a non-loving or abusive relationship can make us afraid to trust in love again. That makes more sense to me.

Sooner or later we start to understand that love is more than verses on a valentine or the romance you see in a movie. It takes work, like anything of value. When love finds us in a loving relationship -- when we know what we have is the "real deal" -- we realize it's the most important thing in our lives and it's worth working at to keep it alive.

Love is mysterious and magical. It's radiance never fades. We are love -- and I think it's the greatest treasure in the Universe.

Namaste