The impossible love

I’m always curious about certain events that keep recurring throughout life. You can note it down as experience…or as a lesson that you have yet to learn but what does it all mean? If everything happens for a reason, and we are merely following a path that has been already set out for us…then what does it really mean when your path leads you to fall in love with the one person that you cannot have? Of course we can always say it’s a question of choice, after all, in my case religion has already determined that I must build my family with a fellow Muslim. Society frowns upon women who get involved with married men. Decency dictates that cheating is a definite no-no. So then do I take my past experience as a test of faith, morality….? For a long time, this question ran loose in my mind. But then one day, I realized that even though I always experienced the ‘impossible love’ I never went beyond it – that was my elusive lesson for all those experiences.

These past three weeks have been a wonderful journey of discovery, and I owe it to the pure genius that is Paulo Coelho. For the longest time, love to me was about sacrifice, struggle, pain…in other words it was the destructive part of love that made more sense. That is not to say that my past relationships have been full of pain or were on the verge of abusive, but I mistook the needless suffering for love. Yet during that period, I didn’t know how to love in a way that didn’t create all this drama. That ‘aha’ moment came when reading ‘eleven minutes’ and although the entire book helped me understand things so much better, there is a particular passage that reads “All my life, I thought love was a voluntary enslavement. Well that’s a lie: freedom only exists when love is present”

Those words liberated me in ways I couldn’t imagine….no wonder love made me miserable – I was always trying to control it! Needless to say that I found it extremely difficult to allow someone to love me…I would find ways to push the person away, and when they did leave I would be hurt thinking that well they didn’t love me enough in the first place…

Looking back I remember the wonderful people that have graced my life and lovingly allowed me to be part of theirs and I apologize for my old ways…but also look into the future and am comforted by the knowledge that I am finally open to love.