This Is How It Goes
For me, love is in the little things. I think, far too often, we imagine love in terms that are grander than we can really understand or appreciate. We think about hugs and kisses, about happiness and selflessness and passion and joy. But I believe that when we try to quantify love with words like these, we fail to understand that there is a beautiful simplicity in love— that it is not always sweeping or dramatic. In fact, sometimes we don’t even recognize love—it appears to us in a form that we weren’t expecting.
In my life, I have found that love is kind of like the mail. You get it everyday, and sometimes you even send it out to others. There are bills and documents, which you usually toss aside, and there are birthday cards and letters and packages, which you treat like gifts. Love is like this too. Sometimes, it is like a bill—we get it everyday and we usually ignore it or forget about it. But this type of love is just as essential and it may be very different from one person to another. I see it in the way my little brother, James, calls me into his room at night to answer all the crazy questions that float around in his head during the day. (Last night, he asked me how to spell the word “manager” and if soldiers could go to sleep when they were done fighting.) I see this type of love in my sister, Amelia, when we have WWF smack-downs on the living room floor, just for fun. I see it in my friends when we tease each other during our Richard Simmons workouts. I even see it at mass during the Our Father when my siblings and I hold hands and see who can squeeze the other person’s fingers harder. These are only a few small moments that, separately, may not carry a whole lot of weight. These things are a part of our everyday lives and we tend to just overlook them, kind of like those bills we get in the mail. But in order to have a functioning life, you’ve got to acknowledge those bills and in order to experience love to it’s fullest extent, you’ve got to learn how to recognize it, even when it is weird or seemingly insignificant.
Now, there is another type of love. A type that is, perhaps, more recognizable. This is the love I feel when my dad and I are running errands and he holds my hand through the parking lot, not because he thinks his eighteen year old daughter needs help crossing the street, but because he just wanted to. This is the kind of love that I remember in my grandpa, who would take a running start and then slide down the hallway to greet us at his front door. This is the very same love that I am lucky enough to see a lot of in my life, but it may not be that way for everyone. Maybe the love in your life is not always presented to you in that birthday card or package in the mail. Some of us simple have more bills, and that is okay. There is no right type of love, there is not standard of loving that we all have to meet. It’s simply a matter or recognizing it and giving that love back in return, freely and without expectations. The postage has already been paid.
