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August 12, 2008

Heaven-Hell

Am beginning to think there is no such thing as just love; Or hate for that matter. Where there is love, there will be hate lurking in the corners ready to pounce and shake things up a bit. Where there is hate, there probably was love earlier whose space it now occupies. I wonder if this is true for all absolutes. Even the most dastardly person will probably cough up a little bit of bravery when the right situation calls for it and even the most courageous man will surrender to fear sometime...

One of Jhumpa Lahiri's short stories had a woman in it who describes the change in a man she loves as "Heaven-Hell"; She happens to be married and develops feelings for this other man who relates to her in ways her husband can never can, she marries in India and settles down to a life of being a bored house-wife in the US and meets this desi Grad student by chance...anyway, it's an interesting story - He ends up falling in love with an American girl and she says something like, "He has changed so much...it is like Heaven-Hell", somewhat like the love-hate feeling that we often encounter in life, I guess.

Sometimes, I wonder if I invest way too much in relationships. So much easier to not be involved and just flit along from person to person as my whim dictates and just have a fun time. I have often declared with a little more than a hint of pride, "Oh, he is my closest friend", "She would definitely tell me" and then, poof! One day, he is no longer my closest friend and turns out, she didn't really tell me about it...and then I wonder what went wrong? Expectation? Pride? Or maybe just that these things exist in pairs. And the exact opposite feeling/event is probably occurring right now in another parallel universe and given some time, they just exchange places.

Ping pong :)

Only there is no winner or loser and by the time we figure out if we played it all right, the game is over.

5 comments:

HN said...

Well sometimes even the closest of our friends end up not telling us something we would have wanted to know.Maybe something was going on in his or her life which he/she did not want to talk about because underneath the seemingly harmless earth there was hot lava flowing.So such issues are purely circumstantial.Sometimes it helps to take the first step in healing relationships.But then there will alaways be a he liked him-he liked her-she liked him-he liked her-she liked her...

expertdabbler said...

Konja naal mokkai post a pottukittu irundha ramya (sorry ennoda honest opinion.. no offense)
has come up with very good post :)

>>Am beginning to think there is no such thing as just love;

i agree. it is always a case of love-hate relationship. only the degree varies.

>> most dastardly person

you might want to change it to cowardly person or am i wrong?

Feeling hurt by loved ones is a universal suffering for all human beings. And its precisely those hurt feelings that make us tie more passionately to our loved ones. Thats how we get engulfed in that circle.

My thinking right now is, love is a subset of life, not life itself.
We need it, but should not be consumed by it. Lest our meaning of life is completely defined by our loved ones. There is no chance of doing anything meaningful in life thereafter. The entire life will then be one love-hate cycle.

Love / friendship la kooda konjam tacticala dhaan irukanum so that the relationship sustains.

RS said...

hn - hmm, true. Hard to take that first step though, somehow ego creeps in :)

p~k - I meant dastardly (meaning cowardly)...

Hmm, true. Sometimes aazham pathu thaan kala vudanum pola iruku :)

frissko said...

hmm...reminded me of this poem i read long back...that goes something like...
'Life, you give me wisdom,
And in the bargain, take away my youth' :)...

RS said...

frissko - :)

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