Friday, October 26, 2012

Love, the balance of wills.




To Paulo, my balance.

A relationship is, among other things, the search for the delicate balance of two wills. It is the meeting of two people who strive to walk together, in the same direction. It is the creation of a new energy. It is, among other things, a continuous negotiation between affection and power - the invention of a new place where the limits of both, affection and power, are tested.
And there is nothing more dangerous and destructive in a relationship than to transform love in a struggle for power: when one wants to beat the other, when one wants to dominate the other, when one wants to impose on the other - at any price, in any circumstance.
When love and power collide, it distorts the essence of affection: love becomes the springboard for a battle of wills and not to a settling of wills. And what is measured in this fight is the strength, the ability to subjugate another, to force him to accept our own truths and desires.
The beginning of love opens the way for people to meet and reinvent themselves, to find out who they are and how they are to the other, to establish a foundation of respect - because it is the respect that allows us to live with the similarities and to accept the differences. But it is over the years - side by side - that people are able to overcome themselves, to amaze each other, to take care of each other, to create a truly intimacy, to create spaces where words, silences and wills are balanced around a center thread of tenderness.
What makes a loving relationship unique and special is the possibility for two beings to become one, not just through the body but also through the soul. However, if the power invades the daily agenda of a relationship, transforming the situations in strength training, people become worse human beings - more aggressive, more primitive and far less generous. These are terrible relationships when one exacerbates the worst characteristics of the other’s! Love is not for that: its main capability is to make people better, softer, more serene and undoubtedly more beautiful.
The power has everything to do with ego, pride and arrogance, love has everything to do with altruism, beauty and elevation. The power overshadows the future, love brightens it. The power is based on relationships of subordination, love in relationships of equality.
Power crushes love because it is a conquest of territory, a search for completely irrelevant victories that do not lead anywhere and that only show an empty exercise of false strength. Because the real power lies not in subordinating to the other, but to accept him, to give him room to flourish, let him find his own glow and sometimes to make him shine.
Power is stigma, the mark of brutality. Love is the exercise of the virtuous.
Power is heavy and dark. Love is light as champagne and it transforms people into bright beings like those luminescent fish that glow in the deep sea, as if lighted by a lamp inside them.
Power and love are strange territories, from different countries. They are parallel languages that do not meet: power is the exercise of strength and love is the exercise of tenderness.

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