Is It Possible to Care Too Much?

So much has occurred these past few weeks. I graduated from my 2 year college with highest honors, and a very special award where the faculty and staff choose the recipient. But today is not a day for talking about myself. No, today is a day for contemplation and introspection.

Recent events and those past have got me to wondering, what is love? Can we truly define it? The Dictionary attempts to, describing love as "an intense feeling of deep affection". Sure, that may be the main definition in the English language, but once again words fail us where emotions run wild and tangle in innumerable and unforeseen factors. There are so many different kinds of love in this world. The love of friends (our chosen family), the love of a parent, the love that is truly joy for a personal passion, the love of blood family, and romanic love. Any of these have the ability to bring us great happiness, and yet, simultaneously bring us more pain than we ever thought was possible.

The first and the final of these can be two of the most destructive. With your friends you want to be there to help them, you don't want to see them be harmed. But I've learned sometimes all you can do is watch your friend walk off the edge of the cliff, then be there to pick them back up when they fall. This is a feeling of helplessness brought on by how much we care for those friends we love. To be helpless, powerless, to do something, anything, it hurts. You want to take your friend into your arms and tell them it will be okay. But truly it is not just your friend you wish to convince, it is yourself. You're trying to console and comfort your own fears, bring hope to yourself when there's nothing you can do except be there.

With someone you love, that love that drives you mad, that love that makes you do crazy things, this one is the one that changes you. It causes you to make rash decisions without thinking, and to ignore the good advice of your closest friends. Even when you know they're 100% right. This love is the one they talk about most in developmental psychology class. The one that happens in stages, and never really goes away, even when it fades. But what happens if such a love is unknown if it is shared, or even unrequited? This can be so inordinately painful that it in itself can drive us insane. When you care to a point that you just hope to the powers above that the other person is happy, even if it's not with you...it's awful. It's difficult to get over, to move on. It's even worse if this person is a friend as well. If time does not help, then what will? If you don't listen to the good advice of your best friends, then who will you listen to? Not your heart. It's too torn and confused. This is what most folks tend to listen to however, getting caught in a boomerang cycle that rips anew every time you believe you're properly healed again. In this case you have choices to change your life, to turn it around. Find someone new, let go of that which can never be and continue to be the best friend that you can be. Or you can stop all contact. Cut the person out of your life completely. Doesn't sound to appealing if this person has been a long time friend does it?

Time with those we love, is somehow taken for granted while we are experiencing it. Children want to spend time with their friends not mom and dad, grandchildren (no matter the age) wonder why they must go visit their boring grandparents once again, and we always feel as if there will be another time to spend with our friends and relations. This is unfortunately not true. That precious time can be ripped from us as fast as it was given. Love is something that as much as we may want it to know time upon occasion, does not. Do not sit around waiting for love. Go out and make your own, and never take time for granted.

This photo is from Whitepark Bay in County Antrim.