Disgraceful, Crazy, Absentminded

Flashback to earlier this summer:

I pulled out of the parking lot at Trader Joe’s and this song came on the radio—something cheesy and sad, the antithesis of why I had my radio set on that particular station. I had hoped for a steady stream of superficial tunes that would make me feel upbeat while I was driving. As it turned out, every single peppy pop song on the radio had something to do with a broken heart.

I waited for the light to change and sobbed, my face crumpled into an ugly teary mess, when something grabbed my attention out of the corner of my eye. A panicked, handsome young man in a business suit was sprinting from the sidewalk into the middle of the street, towards my car. He mouthed something at me through my window while gesticulating wildly. I was dumbstruck. It actually took me a minute to realize that he was talking to me. Without wiping my eyes or my nose, I cracked my window open.

“Are you okay?” He asked. The guy looked so genuinely concerned that I tried to compose myself, and said, “Yes I’m fine.”

He was not convinced. To be fair, he did just see me in a full blown sobbing session and the evidence was all over my face.


“Are you sure?” He asked, still alarmed. At this point I was simply moved by his candor, by his boldness of running to my car in the first place.

“Yes. Thank you—thank you, but I’m okay.” As he walked away hesitantly—he really wanted to make it better—I realized that he did help me in a way.

The light turned green, the cheesy song was still playing, but my urge to cry had completely dissipated. At first I wasn’t quite sure why; perhaps, because that was such a strange interruption to my emotional breakdown, I was in a state of shock. But no—it was the revelation that I was not in a vacuum.  A person who did not know me, who had no context for understanding my sadness, or any agenda other than compassion, wanted to help alleviate my pain. Now obviously no one could do that for me, but this display of compassion from a stranger gave me enough perspective that I could start to release my pain for myself. This was the peak of my heartbreak.

I cried more after this encounter (and possibly just as hard), but it was a different sort of crying; it was cathartic. I knew I had to experience the fullness of my sadness, but I also positively knew that I would come out the other side with a strong and open heart.

The beautiful thing about a broken heart is that it is capable of so much love in the first place, you actually suffer from the inability to share that love with someone else. As I have been reassured in the past, I will experience much more heartbreak throughout my life. Well, okay. Fine. If that’s the price for true, unconditional love, then I suppose it’s a price worth paying, because none of the hurt I have felt from the absence of love even compares with what it feels like to experience its presence. I will continue to treasure love in all its forms, even the smallest. I’m going to go ahead and call that surprise moment of compassion outside of Trader Joe’s, love. Felt like it to me, and so far, that’s the only qualification I’ve got.

Seems appropriate to close with the wise words of Rumi:

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,

absentminded. Someone sober

will worry about things going badly.

Let the lover be.

-Rumi

Mission Impossible

For a little while now, I’ve wanted to start a blog about human connectedness, focused on a theme that unites us all as people no matter what our background might be. In the coming months I’m going to travel outside of my Los Angeles habitat to the other side of the globe where I will continue writing, but for now, I have the opportunity to begin my blog in the city I grew up in. Seems like home is the best place to start.

The comfort of being home can sometimes make me complacent in my interactions with strangers, because it’s easy to go through the motions in a familiar city. I can show others courtesy and respect without really considering the secret stories I’ll never know. Everyone has a past that informs how he views the world. As soon as I remember that, my acts of kindness towards others become more deliberate and I also become aware of the kindness I see from others. I believe that these acts of kindness—no matter how small—are evidence of the love we all have for one another as people. I don’t think love is just the emotion you have for those most intimate with you, but that it’s a force that connects us all, familiars and strangers alike.

At least in the part of the world I’ve grown up in, “love” is a word thrown around all day every day, almost to the point of overuse. It’s applied to material objects just as much as it’s applied to other living beings. How can the same word be used to describe how one feels about a song or a type of food, and also be used to describe how one feels about a grandmother, a child, or a lover? But perhaps the widespread use of this word speaks not to its irrationality (of course, who ever says love is rational?) but more to its overwhelming power over all of us as human beings. We love because we are human. We sing about it, we write about it, we hunt for it—we are driven towards finding Love for the entirety of our lives. Yet what is it that we are searching for?

It is nearly impossible to define love without circular logic and it can’t be identified by concrete characteristics or examples. But in the words of Potter Stewart, “I know it when I see it.” I believe we come to know love by observing it in action, until our understanding of what love is and what it is not becomes intuitive.

I’m no expert on the subject, but I know that I have felt it and I know that I have seen it around me wherever I have been in the world. I would like to investigate the nature of love and discover it in ways I haven’t before. Perhaps then I can help uncover some truths about this intangible mystery—or at the very least, uncover some truths about the search for love itself.