Life is a journey of love. From the very instant we are conceived, we are the product of the love shared by two individuals, Mum and Dad. During our development from zygote to an embryo and then a fetus, we are constantly in contact with the love of our parents; from the rhythm of our mother’s heartbeat to the gentle touch of our father. This love accompanies us through our growth and shapes our thinking of the little world we inhabit in the amniotic sac. We respond to this love with slight motions felt by all who touch the outer walls of our world. At birth, amidst labour pains and the focus of the medical practitioners, we shout as we fill our lungs with air accompanied by the scent of our mother’s hard work, and mother’s love.
Home is where this love abounds. As babies, we are shown more love than we want. We even dare to demand more by screaming out our lungs. From grandparents to uncles, aunties, cousins, and siblings, we become the epicenter of gravity, and their world revolves around us. We become the apple of many eyes and a joy to behold. Through the love we receive, we shape our idea of the world we have been born into. We get a measure of things, our place in the family, and how to interact with the world.
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As toddlers, we are given the opportunity to show off the love we have received to others. We are taught communication and how to interact with those outside the family. We start to make friends outside the home as we grow into young adults. Then we realize that there are different degrees to love, and we cannot love everyone to the same degree. This hits us when we have arrived at puberty, with raging hormones that never seem to want to take the back seat as our bodies begin to change. The love we were introduced to needs to be properly defined: eros, philia, storge, and agape exist in the same spectrum. However, varied these degrees of love may be, we still have love in one of these forms accompanying us through life’s journey, and we begin to experiment a lot more in our relationships to find out where each person we come in contact with falls. As young adults, eros becomes a chief companion as we try to master the urges in our bodies. Then we realize it is just a companion that doesn’t stay long but is based on emotions. We come to see that the best companion is philia. Few realize its importance in their journey until many failed attempts at building a lasting relationship.
When it is time to pick a life partner, we run to philia while asking eros for a lot of help along the way to keep the relationship fresh and exciting. At this stage of life, we have accumulated a lot of experience from our journey with love, and now we look forward to our own product of love. We bring forth life and pour all our experiences with love into that life. Teaching what love is and helping to understand that it is an essential part of life. We make it our life’s mission to communicate what we have learned thus far from loving and are still learning with our journey of love with our offspring. We get to give agape to all we come across and share our experiences with them.
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In the twilight of our lives, we are surrounded by all the products of our love and their love. We get to see the love we have transmitted into their lives through the stories they share with us as we grow grey and wrinkled. At the very end, we come to realize that we have journeyed so far with love itself. When our body gets cold and is lowered to decay, we leave behind, in the minds of those we love, the memory of our journey which they have seen and we have shared with them. We are never really dead because our journey with love lives on in the hearts of those we have loved.
Love is an ever-present companion in our voyage through the flowing stream of life. Our ability to recognize this companion is essential to understanding life’s journey.
This article was published in the April 2022 edition of the WSA magazine.
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