'Tis the season of love.I stopped by the grocery store last night to pick up a wedding card for my friend. The place was packed (thank you "PTA Night") and the lines were a little long for my liking. I was so wrapped up in digging my wallet out of my purse that I didn't realize I got in line behind two kids. I sighed and thought, "Irrrr... they probably have cash... that's going to add at least 20 seconds to each transaction." They must have been brother and sister. The boy was about eight or nine years old and gave a handful of candy bars to the cashier. She rang each bar code and said, "Your total is $4.61." To my surprise the little boy threw his fist in the air and exclaimed, "Yessss!! Cheap valentine!!" I forgot to be mad about the long lines and had to stifle a giggle. The boy seemed really excited about his prospects and after his sister completed her transaction (with a debit card, I might add), he left the store smiling.
Hours after my grocery store visit I made it to the wedding reception with 15 minutes to spare. As I stood in line and watched the glowing bride and groom greet guests I marveled at the fact they had found each other and made this leap of faith. I suppose love comes in many forms. Sometimes it's hidden in a candy wrapper or a ring box but most of the time it seems intangible. It can be a look, a touch, a word or a feeling hovering in the air. It is hard to separate the goopie commercialized Valentine's Day goo from the real substance of romantic love. "Love" has become associated with spending money and, even if we can get it for $4.61 or even cheaper, we're buying into the concept that the Beatles were WRONG and money CAN buy us love. If the Beatles are proved wrong, is this life really worth living?
Tell me - what do you think love is? Can you put a price on it?
I think that the physical world is foundational to love--prerequisites include health, some funding, the general necessities of life. But that does not mean that love is the same thing as those prerequisites. A candle might be made of wax and string, but light and heat are not wax and string. They are something else entirely. Just because the light and heat are dependent on wax and string does not mean that they are the same. The flame is a vibrant, dynamic, almost living thing; wax and wick are mundane by comparison.
ReplyDeleteThe world is in a rush to quantify everything with numbers; that which cannot be measured by some real-world independent physical metric is reduced to a price tag instead. Even if there is no correlation between the real value of a thing and its price in cash, it makes insecure minds roll over and go back to sleep to think that everything has been measured, tagged, quantified, numbered, soaked in formaldehyde and stuffed in a jar on a shelf somewhere, tamed, controlled, homogenized, pasteurized, sanitized, sterilized, regulated, managed into gray oatmeal. And packaged for sale at Wal-mart.
(Most advertisements are selling something other than the product itself; popularity, sex, love, nostalgic family moments, togetherness, meaning, identity, physical perfection...ads scream that their products have the capacity to confer these "lovely intangibles.")
Love suffers similar abuses; no one can get a handle on it, but they CAN make scans of people's brains, and name all the neurotransmitters, and so they say that those things, which are wick and wax, are love itself. You can't grab a flame; you have to grip the candle. You can't really hold onto love; you can see the physical world, inner and outer, that spawns it.
You can put a price on it, and you would be very misguided and mistaken in doing so.
PS--I have described what love is not; I don't have a clue what it really is. But I think we all have an inkling of what it could be, and should be.
Well if the Beatles were wrong then we are screwed. Since the Beatles ring some form of doctrine in our home. LOL. Love is....crap how do you answer that. Love is more than liking right? Love is something that makes us think about it, sometimes we crave it, its something we feel passionate about it....and perhaps something we dont think we can live WITHOUT. Love takes on different levels or intensities. Sometimes I minimize it by saying things like I love Twix candy bars. That means something different than when I say I love my parents. Okay enough said for now. I don't think you can put a price on it. (Unless we are talking APPLE products we can't live WITHOUT)
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