when i step back to observe the aftermath, i always think it’s so strange how sometimes all it takes is one second. or one minute. for something big to sweep into our lives unexpectedly and change everything. it feels somewhat inconsistent to some major foundation of life. a woman spends 9 whole months bearing a child, not one minute. we spend days or weeks studying for our finals or putting together an important proposal, not mere seconds. we mourn for ages when someone we love dies. yet… sometimes all it takes is one moment for something incredibly beautiful, or incredibly disastrous, to happen. and we are taken completely by surprise. but i guess the unpredictability of each day is a major foundation of life too.

:)

anyway. i wanna share with you guys something interesting that i read today. this is part of a short speech by the greek writer Aristophanes on the subject of love. prior to this passage, he is telling his audience this myth of how humans originally had two faces, four legs, four hands, two sets of sexual organs. there were also three types of humans – male, female and hermaphrodites (an individual possessing both male and female characteristics and sexual organs). one day, the humans attempted to overthrow the gods, and when the gods saw this, they decided to punish the humans by cutting them in half and then scattering these halves across the world, thus weakening them.

so each human now had one face, two legs, two hands and one set of sexual organs; in other words, they have the human form that we now know of. if they were previously male, then their own other half would be male, and likewise with the females. but if they were previously hermaphrodites, their other half would be of the opposite sex. whichever way, because their natural form had been cut in two, each human longed painfully for its own half.

and thus Aristophanes says:

“this then is the source of our desire to love each other. love is born into every human being, it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.

and so, when a person meets the half that is his very own, then something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.

these are the people who finish out their lives together and still cannot say what it is they want from one another. no one would think it is the intimacy of sex – that mere sex is the reason each lover takes so great and deep a joy in being with the other. it’s obvious that the soul of every lover longs for something else; his soul cannot say what it is, but like an oracle it has a sense of what it wants, and like an oracle it hides behind a riddle. suppose two lovers are lying together, and Hephaestus stands over them with his mending tools, asking, “What is it you human beings really want from each other?”

and suppose they’re perplexed, and he asks them again: “Is this your heart’s desire then – for the two of you to become parts of the same whole, as near as can be, and ever to separate, day or night? Because if that’s your desire, I’d like to weld you together and join you into something that is naturally whole, so that the two of you are made into one. Then the two of you would share one life, as long as you lived, because you would be one being, and by the same token, when you died, you would be one and not two in Hades, having died a single death. Look at your love, and see if this what you desire: wouldn’t this be all the good fortune you could want?”

surely you can see that no one who received such an offer would turn it down; no one would find anything else that he wanted. instead, everyone would think he’d found at least what he had always wanted: to come together and melt together with the one he loves, so that one person emerged from two. why should this be so? it’s because, as i said, we used to be complete wholes in our original nature, and now ‘Love’ is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to once again be complete.”

Extracted from The Speech of Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium.

this speech really resonated with me. for many reasons. it made me think about my own beliefs about ‘The One’, and how it is always so obvious to us when we find our true other halves; when there is affinity, there just is, and you just know. i’m a big believer of affinity, be it towards our partners, potential partners or friends. not all of us are lucky enough to find our The Ones though, or even someone remotely close.. but then there are some of us who do :) and i think when that happens, it is the epitome of harmony and happiness.

it also caused me to think about the question that Hephaestus (the god of craftsmanship) posed to the two humans lying together – what is it that humans really want from each other? it made me think about the reasons we fall in love, the reasons we want to stay in love, and the reasons that make us fight for our love so that we may never lose it. i came up with no answers. i guess we love because we love. i used to hate it when any of my boyfriends say that to me – “i love you because i just do”. i always thought it was such a cop-out answer, something you say when you dont really know why you love the other person. but now i see that there is little more you can add to that, that would add any real, significant, larger meaning to the fact that we love each other. i’ve been asking the wrong question all this time. what i meant to ask was, ‘what do you love about me?’ instead of, ‘why do you love me?’. so silly. i spent so much lost time feeling angry.

i did a lot of thinking today. am i happier? i dont know yet. maybe. we’ll see :)