Is all love just pain?
Has it ever happened to you that you were walking around and you saw a really beautiful flower? You fell in love with that flower. So much so that you almost wanted to pluck it and smell it. To revere in its beauty and to share the love you had for it.
Maybe you plucked the flower or maybe you didn’t. But one thing is sure, that there comes a time you love something so much, it turns into something violent in nature.
Anger is the purest form of compassion. Compassion for the status quo. A force against change. Something that causes only destruction.
Of course, I am not referring to criminal behaviour but love begets a certain vulnerability in life. You are open and giving. It impacts you a lot and if something happens to this love, it is the same vulnerability that is scratched; and it throws you down a hell hole of anger. And in such anger, you go on destroying the very thing you love and sometimes yourself.
You want to save your love. It is really valuable to you and you become overprotective of it. May it be flowers or humans, your nature propels you to save your loved possession at any cost.
Another example is when you have a project you love a lot. You spend a lot of time and resources nurturing it. You are heavily invested in it emotionally. And when in such a situation an outsider comes and tries to change things in the project, you become defensive. You get annoyed, then frustrated and then the anger blows out of proportion.
Your anger gets outside the domain of understanding. Your long-standing love for your project destroys you completely. You suffer as does your project.
This anger sometimes turns into a pity pit of revenge. You start finding reasons to justify your anger. Just like Gollum of LOTR, you tell yourself lies about why you deserve the ‘ring’. How you cannot do anything wrong against the ring since you love it so much. You get blinded by your own mental ‘love flushes’. And you go down that hole faster than your self-image.
And eventually, you channel that anger into revenge. You play the blame game. Sometimes even against the very person you loved. Things get toxic and malicious. Your own vulnerability starts eating you from the inside out and you feel betrayed by your past, by your people and by this world.
But is revenge in such a situation, to save your love, to prove your love, to be worthy of your love, right? It is justified?
Just like killing in self-defence.
Is anger really the purest form of compassion where you are ready to lose and destroy yourself in the name of love? Where you become selfless, with no understanding of your reality and you start breaking yourself into pieces to save a little of what you know as love.
Is to love really is to kill? Or is it just a garden of pain that one day someone’s going to pluck?
P.S. For the concerned, this is just a thought piece. My personal belief is completely stoic and in no way do things like this happen until something goes really wrong. I hope that it doesn’t in your life.
Thanks to Summy Antony, Avneet and Harshal for reading the drafts of this.
