Love - Whatever That Is

Strong love has you fixated on that person all day, every day, from when you first wake in the morning (when you've probably been dreaming about them) to the moment of falling asleep. The only respite is distraction and you can only take so much of that before the gravity pulling back to the object of thought's desire is too powerful to fight, and as you didn't want to fight it anyway there seems to be no choice in the matter other than to go with the flow. Accompanied by all the usual highs and lows, the crescendos and the crashes, the tears and the dancing. 

"I never knew love like this before and I never will again," it's the kind you get once in a lifetime and it will do with you what it will. Forget about the script, it's out of your hands in the struggle between saying the right thing and being who you are. 

"A good love is delicious, you can't get enough too soon," sang Jewel, but you can overload on obsession and find yourself spinning into a wall that somehow you know in advance is going to smash you to pieces, then you're left to pick up the pieces and say, "Now that it's here and we don't know what to do with it, the flame is parked somewhere out of reach and it's up to the Universe what happens next," as is usually the case - the only necessity of living in the Now being to install the level of acceptance necessary to understand how to let go of the need for control. Wanting and needing are two different things, they tend to go hand in hand with love but the confusion between the three elements is rife, full of potholes and tangles and waterfalls you didn't see coming. When the rest is up to you, you get it all wrong and have to pay the price. Guilt gets a field day. Footholds are guesswork and if the rest falls into place, well, you're ready for another round of jump-and-fall.

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There are four forces at work in the Universe, two of them being the Strong and the Weak forces. Quarks - what we're made of - are held together by Gluons and they utilise Strong force to perform their binding mechanism. Splitting quarks apart forcibly is virtually impossible. But the Weak force is utilised by all particles in releasing their original form while turning into something else, e.g. in splitting particles which decay into residual particles, so that nature has a permanently flowing, changing structure from which to create. As you'll see from the links, these forces act only on the very smallest of particles whereas electromagnetism and gravity act on pretty much everything. So we, for what we are, look at the macro Universe and have trouble deciphering where the miniature Universe fits in, since we can't see it.

Being strong and being weak are elements of the love game we are all very familiar with. What kind of actions constitute which force is well scripted in social protocols, but the tables can turn on either in an instant. Taking a leaf out of the quantum book, therefore, offers a little sense in why this should be the case. Strong binds together, weak lets it go. In love, all we want is to bind it together, and being weak caves us in to the inevitable when all that ends up happening is the pushing apart. There's a trampoline to bounce on for a while before the forces converge to form something of a stability. And even then, that's not going to settle for very long before the next challenge sweeps in and changes things when we least expect. That's life. Let's live.

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