catching love...

Someone I know, told me the other day "love like you have never been hurt before". I understand what the person meant ...its about loving without a care and being open to opportunities to love. But is there are right time to love. A close friend, shared his criteria with me, Right Time, Right Place and Right Person. He said that if all three don't fall in place then it may be a good time to practice some good judgement. Right Time - meaning if you are available and if the other person is also available and not attached to someone else. Right Place - meaning they have to be at least in the same time zone otherwise you are always having to play catch. Right Person - compatible but challenging enough.


I believe that there are times in our lives when we need to be with someone and times when we need to be alone. I am a big believer in the concept of creating a vacuum when there is too much "noise" and if i don't feel centered. This means i clear everything out to see whats left in order to set my priorities again. Sometimes it takes a day or two and sometimes it may take months. Its a scary thing to do for most of us especially when applied to relationships - its about being able to make an empty space to really listen to your heart. Most of us get uncomfortable with empty space, we rush out to fill it again quickly. Notice what you do when you throw out a piece of furniture, we fill that space up quite soon with other pieces. We do the same thing when we find ourselves alone, we pick up the phone and start calling someone, we start doing our e-mails, listening to music or we start reading a magazine or book....even in our thoughts and dreams we are never alone...we are thinking of what someone said to us or dreaming about things that happened during the day. When are we really alone?

I sometimes wonder how people make time or space for a partner in their lives when its already so full to the brim. The opposite polarity to all this is that fact that there has never been a time in history where we are more connected to other human beings than at this point in time. We get bombarded with friend requests from face book, linked in, instant messaging, sms's, skype...sometimes we even get the same person using a few modes of communication at the same time. I was travelling in U.S and we were in a bus being taken to another venue, when i turned around and saw my colleague , he was asleep but he was still holding on to his blackberry, reminded me of a child who falls asleep with his toy. He woke up to see me looking at him, I laughed and said that i do the same.


Are all these tools helping us connect with others or are they creating a buffer around us to protect us?... we no longer have to call someone to say " I am sorry, I cant make it to lunch", we can just send a message. In my parents' world, it was rude to make a phone call , we had to go personally to talk to to someone face to face. When i was growing up, if i said to my dad that i rang someone to tell them something, he would say "why didn't you go personally to tell them" These days when i ask someone to talk to another person, they send a message or e-mail. When i ask" did you talk to this person", they say yes and when I ask about their findings they usually say" i don't know yet, I am waiting for a reply"


I think our many tools for communication are similar to all the household gadgets we have, they are meant to save time for us but we are hardly there to use them because we too busy. We are absent from our lives and relationships. My daughter would say that this is true of me. We are caught in the "busy-ness" and the noise. I sometimes wonder if it because we are really busy or are we just afraid to connect with others at a deeper level because we are protecting ourselves in some way?

Loving like we have never been hurt implies that we are still holding on to the pain that goes with loving someone.How about loving like if its the last time to be with someone instead?Maybe if we did that more, we will have less politics in the work place, less relationship strives and misunderstandings. ... less extra marital affairs...i think the reason people have them is because they can do exactly this ...love like if it is going to be the last time to be with someone because of all the uncertainty around such a relationship. Really, how would we respond if we knew that we never going to see a particular person again? would it color the way we saw them and how we dealt with them? Of course!

The truth of the matter is that life is a one time journey, it opens up windows at different points in our life to love fully and experience our hearts almost bursting with love. Catch love as it passes you and infuse it with your magic and send it along its way.