Roots and Wings

Some musings about love

Love, I’ve come to realise, is offering up your mundane, and having that ordinary, cherished.

Whilst you may offer your ‘ordinary’ to people every day - the postman, supermarket cashier etc, it is a casual exchange of indifference. Those people interact with your ‘ordinary’, but they do not love it.

Those who love us, will. They are happy to be with us in that realm for long periods of time. We don’t bore them. They aren’t looking at their phone or wondering when they can make a sharp exit. They are comfortable with us, and we with them.

Some people think love is about sharing secrets, the ‘big reveals’. But whilst it takes courage to bare one’s soul and confide in someone, secrets will always be intriguing and juicy. Their exclusivity, secures attention.

The mundane - your mundane - is the opposite. It’s not exciting at all. It’s dull. This is precisely why someone loving your ordinary is the most valuable form of love, in my opinion.

Eventually, we run out of stories, we can’t always be high-wiring some extreme emotion that makes us ‘interesting’.

We can’t always be strutting about like a peacock in our fancy clothes, preened and poised. It’s a costume, a mask.

Same goes for loving something ‘about’ someone - something they do, a talent they have. We can’t always be impressing someone with whatever our ‘gift’ or ‘unique selling point’ is.

Love cannot survive on one ingredient alone. It is holistic or it is nothing. No matter how much you admire something about someone, it’s just one element of their entire being. It does not define them. We have our ‘queen bee’ inside us, a dominant part of our personality, but we are a working hive of many different components.

Life, for most people, for the most part is bland. We may want to be drinking champagne on a yacht in St Tropez or whatever, but most of our time in reality is spent completing menial chores - doing the dishes, laundry, feeding pets, communicating about appointments, working, sat in traffic. Even leisure time cannot be all high adrenaline. Low key pursuits like reading and walking are more common, and more needed than intense stimulation. They stabilise us.

The same can be said of our thoughts. Sure, we maybe fantasise about a cabin in the woods, hand in hand walks along the beach, swinging-from-the-chandeliers sex etc, but even most human thought is not concerned with such things.

In reality we spend most of the time either raking over the coals about stuff we can’t change “hope I didn’t piss off so-and-so……”, “why didn’t I remember his name when I saw him earlier? He thinks I’m rude now”, “why didn’t I say what I felt before they died?”, “why didn’t I value what I had at the time?”

or the tedious;

“what will I cook for dinner?”, “what music shall I stick on?”, “can I be arsed taking the bin out?”, “need to nip to the shop”, “do I have a stamp somewhere?”

Yes, often they are single thoughts, but their combined weight makes for a considerable amount of our time.

Once we were told by social media and popular culture what we should have. These days, it’s what we should be talking about.

We’ve all seen the memes and quotes;

“I don’t do small talk, I want to discuss whether aliens exist or if you believe in life after death”

Of course it’s more stimulating to dissect the ‘big’ mysteries, but love means incorporating those chats into your regular existence. Naturally, spontaneously.

We all have a version of ourselves we pull out for special occasions - parties, job interviews etc. But it’s not one we can maintain long term.

When we put someone on a pedestal (or they us), that constitutes a distance. They need to be beside us, not beyond us.

The person who feels close enough to relay to you every tiny, boring detail of their day, does so like a toddler singing ‘Baby Shark’ for the 99th time or pedantically explaining their Lego model.  They do it because they they feel safe to do so. Because they trust you.

Love is knowing someone’s stories so well you could finish them off yourself. But you don’t, you let the person tell them once again, smiling to yourself. Sweetened by their plain. It’s your ‘just right’ bowl of porridge.

Love may be rare, but it’s a bulk buy of tissues and bandages as well as wine and roses. It is certainly not a precious antique in a cabinet.

There are deal breakers, of course. It’s tricky to find a person who fires your dreams, sparks your brain, connects with your heart, turns your body on, but we absolutely must strive for that.

But all whilst living in the lacklustre realm we spend most of our life in.

The stand out solos must fit into the bigger piece, not the other way round.

That’s what makes them special.

We all want magic - but none of us live in fairyland.

Try for a ‘treehouse’.

You’ll toughen to the elements and sometimes…….the fairies will visit too.

And it will be beautiful.

Both magical and ordinary.

To love, is to know both roots and wings.

Thanks for reading. I now have more than 300 pieces on substack! If you enjoyed this piece, you can find more musings under the heading ‘musings’ on my home page.