on Love, loving, sailing and diving

Can you fall in love with a person many times over? Can you fall in love with a person again without having fallen out of love? I think so. I am doing that now.

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What does that say about love and loving? Maybe love isn’t shallow. Maybe we can fall deeper. Like descending into the deep ocean from shallow sea. There is the falling that first gets us into the water. There is also the falling that takes us deeper, from the beach to the coastal corals, from the coastal corals to the open sea, from the open sea to the open ocean. We go further and further from land, and we go deeper, from the shallows to the deep, from the deep into the gorges and valleys of the sea floor. There is certainly an order that needs to be adhered to, for one will die, a horrible death, if one is taken from the beach to the gorges of the sea floor too quickly. We need training, we need back and forth, we need tempering. Like when we temper eggs when poured into a boiling bowl of liquid. We need to temper it, otherwise it will scramble. We need to temper ourselves, or, we too, will scramble. 

 

There is another thing that we should know about descending into the oceans, that not everyone can, not immediately that is, that there is only so far we can go with our bare flesh, that there is only so much pressure our lungs can take, that when we dive into the deep sea we need a submarine and not just any submarine, but one that is built for the job. When we sail into the open seas, we need a boat. Not just any boat, but a sturdy one. Not a small one, but one that is heavy, stable, that can take a beating or two or more from the waves. One that not only can take the beatings of the waves but also one we can trust in doing so. When we enter a love, a commitment, a marriage, we are committing to getting on a boat, into a submarine, we are committing to sailing into the open oceans, we are committing to deep diving. Sometimes we haven’t done enough tempering. Sometimes we picked the wrong boat. Sometimes we have the right boat. Our boat can take the rough sea and withstand the turbulent waves, but we cannot. We become seasick. We become dizzy. We were not prepared. But we are not to be blamed. There are no good grounds for faulting ourselves for things we cannot prepare for. How can anyone know whether they will be seasick unless they have been out in the open seas? They cannot. But what should we do? Return, of course. Return to the shores. There is no shame in that. We are humans after all. And humans, last time I checked, are land animals. 

 

But I want to be out in the open seas, you say. There is a romance to the borderless oceans, endless waves, an uninterrupted skyline of water, you say. There is a romance to battling waters that seem to never end. There is a romance to being in the middle of vastness. Being alone there, trapped, but not feeling helpless. To be truly alone, but not lonely. I want to be out in the sea. I know I was born on land. I was built to live on land. But I don’t want to be a land animal, says us. That is the funny thing about being human. That we want what is possible, but implausible. We want to make the implausible possible. We want to live in the unlikely. That is the attraction of love, of commitment, of marriage. To believe and strive and trust and build one’s life on something that is possible but implausible, something we know can be true, but will more than likely be not, something that is doable but so so hard. That is romantic. Romance is only found in implausible things. Romance is promising the implausible. Loving someone deeply, truly, calls us to promise the unpromisable. Loving someone deeply, truly back makes us want to believe promises of the unpromisable. It makes us believe the unbelievable. 

 

So we want to live on the seas, we want to live off the waters, we want to escape the lands. But to our great disappointment, we suffer sea-sickness. What should we do? Should we give up hope on living on the seas? Should we just settle on land? We can, but we don’t have to. Sail more, venture more into the open waters. Return when you get sea sick. But still go. Go again and again until you get used to the seas. Until the turning of the waves do not turn your stomach. Until you learn how to ride the waves. Until the waves no longer ride you. Until the waves and its motion feel like the rocking of a rocking chair, the swinging of a swing, and the comfort of a crib.

 

If falling in love is like going further from the coast line, and deeper into the oceans. Then we should take care because wandering from the coast, diving deep into the seas, can be and is dangerous. So can love.

 

But what about falling out of love? Is falling out of love, love ending like leaving the deep oceans? Yes. Just like we cannot go from snorkelling to deep diving too quickly. We also cannot go from deep diving to snorkelling too quickly. Going too quickly in either direction will kill us. We need temping when descending, we also need tempering when ascending. When returning from deeper seas, divers are taught to wait and decompress at each altitude. It is easier to plan this, and temper ourselves when falling in love, when diving down. But it is hard, almost impossible to do this when falling out of love, when coming back up. There is often no warning of falling out of love, of love ending. Before we know it, our oxygen tank has emptied. Air has ran out. In fear of suffocation, we scramble up for air, the speed of which crushes our lungs. Either we die in the depths from the lack of air, or we die on our way up from the crushing of our lungs. By some miracle, sometimes we neither die in the depths nor on the way back up. We survive it. We reach the top. We draw a deep breath. There is a shock when our lungs take in oxygen for the first time in a long time, when it is made to work after thinking it has retired forever. Breathing actually feels like suffocating. It is almost as if our lungs have forgotten how to breathe. It is like being thrown into a foreign land, the language of which we do not speak. Being back out in the air feels like a being fish out of water. It is a great relief, something to be thankful for, to have lived at all. It would be a stupid thing to ask anyone why they didn’t breathe on their way back up. To recount what they have done and ask them what they could have done differently. To have lived at all, is a miracle. When miracles happen, we should cry, we should be thankful. The miracle should silence us. No question should be asked and no question needs answering.