(no subject)
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
Yesterday the cover of the Ottawa Citizen announced that the new Governor General's mission is to put an end to the established two solitudes of the French/English Canadian divide, uniting them in harmony at long last. The concept was established by Hugh MacLennan half a century ago, his observation that in Canada there exists a divide created by religion, economy and the rights of population and dimension as put forward by colonization, resulting in two sides existing in a shared loneliness that unites while paradoxically separating at the same time. It is true in the individual. It is true in me.
I'm a writer. I should be putting words down in a private journal on women as we speak, scribbling away into the late night hour regardless of the fact that I have to get up early and go to class and prolong the wonderful business of attending University classes and finding out more about myself and how I'm going to see the world, a viewpoint which changes little by little everyday. But University isn't entirely responsible.
I liked a girl one time. One night I stayed up until 2:30 in the morning waiting for even the remotest chance that she would get off a bus and come to my house after she left work. I watched the buses run by my house every 20 minutes, pushing the chance even further into obscurity. She never showed. I went to sleep and got up early for an exam the next morning, an exam that I didn't finish because I was tired and drained and uncomfortable. And this is the way it will always be for me. I will always stay up late, literally or figuratively speaking, waiting for a girl to show up, because I know that eventually she will.
This past summer someone asked me the age old question: do you love yourself? I probably think about that question more than I should. The question irritates me, and then I worry that it irritates me because I don't, in fact, love myself. But I don't think a lot of people really understand what posing a question like that to themselves really means. They have ideas, they ask the question of others because it's supposed to solve all emotional problems. Once you love yourself, you're ready to love someone else. But all it really means is that you don't need to love someone else. If you love yourself you won't care about love any longer.
But maybe that's a pessimistic view. I'll tell you, and myself, once and for all, why I love myself, and I will never wonder about the question again.
I want to love someone. I want to understand someone, I want to hear every single fact about someone that I admire and respect, I want to know about their weaknesses, their passions, their secrets and guilt and sins. But this is not for fact of not being able to love myself. I love myself because I'm always 100% confident that there is another person that will want the same things where I'm concerned. That there's someone who will care about all of those things with regard to me, that I am worth recognition and respect and love in return. All of this is true. All of it will come true. And in many ways it already has with the people I've chosen as lovers and friends. It will continue to do so.
I will continue to stay up late gazing out windows. I will continue to feel crushed when I lose a connection because I'm not afraid to live my life, and not stupid enough to think that if I don't put any effort into love it will somehow show up on my doorstep. A girl gets onto an elevator with you and that's an amazing, wonderful coincidence. But what do you do after that? You make sure that the first time you kiss, you kiss on an elevator. You make sure you ask her a bunch of seemingly meaningless questions so that you can pick out a book in a bookstore, write something significant on a page and send it to her in the mail. You make sure that every compilation you make for her has a story that gives just a little, important part of yourself away, and you make sure she knows it. And when she tells you about the things that affect her at the core, beneath the surface appearances that mask who we truly are with a veil of constant propriety and enthusiastic optimism, you embrace those things as if they're afterlife revelations. I live my life that way because I love myself, and because I want to share the love I'm capable of feeling with someone else.
Connection. Two solitudes protecting and touching and greeting each other.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
Yesterday the cover of the Ottawa Citizen announced that the new Governor General's mission is to put an end to the established two solitudes of the French/English Canadian divide, uniting them in harmony at long last. The concept was established by Hugh MacLennan half a century ago, his observation that in Canada there exists a divide created by religion, economy and the rights of population and dimension as put forward by colonization, resulting in two sides existing in a shared loneliness that unites while paradoxically separating at the same time. It is true in the individual. It is true in me.
I'm a writer. I should be putting words down in a private journal on women as we speak, scribbling away into the late night hour regardless of the fact that I have to get up early and go to class and prolong the wonderful business of attending University classes and finding out more about myself and how I'm going to see the world, a viewpoint which changes little by little everyday. But University isn't entirely responsible.
I liked a girl one time. One night I stayed up until 2:30 in the morning waiting for even the remotest chance that she would get off a bus and come to my house after she left work. I watched the buses run by my house every 20 minutes, pushing the chance even further into obscurity. She never showed. I went to sleep and got up early for an exam the next morning, an exam that I didn't finish because I was tired and drained and uncomfortable. And this is the way it will always be for me. I will always stay up late, literally or figuratively speaking, waiting for a girl to show up, because I know that eventually she will.
This past summer someone asked me the age old question: do you love yourself? I probably think about that question more than I should. The question irritates me, and then I worry that it irritates me because I don't, in fact, love myself. But I don't think a lot of people really understand what posing a question like that to themselves really means. They have ideas, they ask the question of others because it's supposed to solve all emotional problems. Once you love yourself, you're ready to love someone else. But all it really means is that you don't need to love someone else. If you love yourself you won't care about love any longer.
But maybe that's a pessimistic view. I'll tell you, and myself, once and for all, why I love myself, and I will never wonder about the question again.
I want to love someone. I want to understand someone, I want to hear every single fact about someone that I admire and respect, I want to know about their weaknesses, their passions, their secrets and guilt and sins. But this is not for fact of not being able to love myself. I love myself because I'm always 100% confident that there is another person that will want the same things where I'm concerned. That there's someone who will care about all of those things with regard to me, that I am worth recognition and respect and love in return. All of this is true. All of it will come true. And in many ways it already has with the people I've chosen as lovers and friends. It will continue to do so.
I will continue to stay up late gazing out windows. I will continue to feel crushed when I lose a connection because I'm not afraid to live my life, and not stupid enough to think that if I don't put any effort into love it will somehow show up on my doorstep. A girl gets onto an elevator with you and that's an amazing, wonderful coincidence. But what do you do after that? You make sure that the first time you kiss, you kiss on an elevator. You make sure you ask her a bunch of seemingly meaningless questions so that you can pick out a book in a bookstore, write something significant on a page and send it to her in the mail. You make sure that every compilation you make for her has a story that gives just a little, important part of yourself away, and you make sure she knows it. And when she tells you about the things that affect her at the core, beneath the surface appearances that mask who we truly are with a veil of constant propriety and enthusiastic optimism, you embrace those things as if they're afterlife revelations. I live my life that way because I love myself, and because I want to share the love I'm capable of feeling with someone else.
Connection. Two solitudes protecting and touching and greeting each other.