Secret Passages of the Heart

Occasionally life relents and, suddenly, I have space to reflect on the love I have for my family. I believe contemplations on the nature of love are easier when it is possible to examine this sought after emotion in a detailed, applied context. Like a complex mathematical theorem or scientific axiom, it may be easier to glean understanding of the thing if a concrete example presents itself.

I remember a particularly strained point early in my relationship with my wife. I had been improving myself for a long time by then. To even have a wife of her caliber I had had to work for years, wearing down my angry edges, learning to respect people in general and women in particular. The process worked and I eventually met and married this most extraordinary woman. Of course, at that time it was a young, evolving relationship, and sometimes problems had to be worked out. I knew I loved her, or at least I knew how to say those words to others and to myself in my own interior monologue. I even believed it; I was not just repeating things to myself to make them true. But how much did I feel it? This question was especially prevalent in the face of that particular evening's challenging interactions.

In the midst of that crisis the deep knowing of my love for my wife came to me in a rush: I can sacrifice things I want to her, I can place her desires before mine, not to win, not to just end the fight, but because I truly do love her and desire her happiness. Moreover, I knew it was not an ordinary love, because my love demanded nothing in return. I was happy to serve her, for her sake, for her joy, and I did not need her reciprocity in any way. This was an intense love I had not felt before. One that subsisted wholly on the act of loving, not on any exterior feedback. It was an awakened feeling that became a new foundation, supplanting the need for the discursive knowing of the earlier inner "love" monologue.

This experience gave me confidence with regards to love. Most people want it. Most people want to believe in it. But many get completely burnt out searching for it. Even our popular culture sometimes tries to convince us there can't be such a thing. True love is relegated to the category of myth by many. Love is seen to be as real as Santa Claus. Yet in dreams, as a child, I had experienced love from a young woman wearing a pink sweater who would just hold me. The emotional experience was so strong that it gave me hope that love was something that truly existed, even in the waking world. The realization of the love I had for my wife cemented the experience in my being, and I was placed beyond hoping and into knowing.

One day, while I was driving, I was contemplating love. The whole of it took shape in my mind as a lovely Renaissance corridor. Love was lovely. As you proceeded through life, you advanced down this amazing corridor, seeing artistic creations both beautiful and horrid, but all the while progressing. Learning about love. Learning how to love and be loved. Gaining knowledge about this extraordinary emotional state through each interaction with the corridor's art objects; by noticing their details as well as taking in the bigger picture.

I imagined the corridor to have an end. You eventually reached the peak of love. That self sufficient emotion that feeds you because you can love someone else completely without needing their response or their favors. I remember feeling quite satisfied with myself for having made it to the end of the corridor. But life proceeds and holds limitless surprises. A child was eventually on its way. I thought that my love for this child would be the same as the love I already knew. Caring for someone, albeit a new someone, with the same elevated intensity and quality with which I cared for my wife. So there I was, at the end of the corridor, smug in knowing that I had nothing more to learn.

Then one day at a standard checkup, the midwife passed a device that amplifies a growing fetus' heartbeat over my wife's belly. I heard the heartbeat. I was overwhelmed. For about ten seconds I was placed in a state of ecstatic joy the likes of which I had never felt before. It's an experience I have not had since. It changed me. There I was, at the end of the love corridor, and some child that I could not even see had appeared, pressed some button hidden behind some marble bust, and a whole new passageway opened up. There were levels of love so rarified that they had been completely hidden from me. So beyond my mediocre understanding of love were they, that I could never, without direct experience, have divined their existence. A secret door opened and not only did I feel a wholly different, blissful love, but I had to recalibrate my entire understanding of the corridor.

The Renaissance corridor of love was almost a trap. It guided you to a culminating point. You reached the end of the corridor and were presented with the perfectly curated collection of exquisite pieces of art, and you believed, "This is it. I understand love." And there is nothing in the corridor to disabuse you of this view. I didn't know. There was no way to know. Without having experienced something more I would never have believed in anything greater. The dead end of the corridor is so convincing, that until someone opens the secret door and drags you through, what lies behind it will simply not exist in your world.

I am eternally grateful to my son for the revelation. It helps me manage the many stresses of fatherhood and raising a small child. It also gifted me, for the first time, a taste of the unfathomable love ascribed to bodhisattvas: to love every being as if you were a mother and each one of them your only child. I never could have known what this truly meant without having been shown the way past the end of the love corridor. It was such an abstract concept, even with the understanding of the love I had for my wife. I had been in the dark; deeper in that lightless void of ignorance than I could have ever believed. I should have known, as I could never muster more than an empty, rustling feeling when I tried to bring up the love of a bodhisattva in my own heart. Having glimpsed a love at least close to it, I can now feel its immense weight.

All of this to say: do not let the jaded of the world set the limits of your heart. While they may cry that the museum where the corridor is located is closed, or worse, does not exits, have faith that there is such a corridor, and that it is filled with treasures. If any part of you has the energy or even the smallest urge to seek out the mysteries and treasures of love, please do not hesitate. It may take years of personal practice. You may be confused at times by some of the things you see along the way towards the corridor's end. But know now that there is a secret passage: love is complex and, perhaps, infinitely deep. It is an extraordinary blessing to be able just to explore any part of the corridor. And it is an ecstatic joy to be shown the secret passages past its end.