All Love but Not Valentine’s.
Monday 14th Feb 2022 marked Valentine’s Day 2022. Walking around town, I noticed how the town was painted in red; red clothes, red balloons, red flowers, red teddy bears, and much more. It was slightly unfortunate that this day fell on a weekday for most people.
On a personal level, I felt out of place. The man who survives by. I stood at the edge of whatever virtual confines of love they may be and watched from a distance at the purported ‘aura’ of love that fell in the air. I don’t know if it’s because I am not an avid believer of Valentine’s Day or simply because it seems out of place somewhat somehow.
Meanwhile, the boys club congregated at the men’s conference. This year’s attendance wasn’t very well attended. First, because the day fell on a Monday; the day that most of us get to set the pace for the rest of our week.
Secondly, a lot of men decided to focus on their work and set the right speed for their week. Others set out to meet their fellow men for a lunch to discuss the next big thing. You know, men are synonymous with discussions about big things.
Even though I speak as if I am anti-Valentine, I am not anti-love. Love is a good thing. Love is a beautiful thing. It can consume as though it were fire. I will speak of love today since it has been all matters love though from the social point and nothing much of the butterflies in the stomachs.
In a nutshell, what does love do to us?
Love brings people together. Love goes beyond the affection thing. On principle, it pulls us together, beyond the surface experience, towards a cause. Be it in marriage, relationships, family, friendship, or any other realm, love gives us a feeling of unity and purpose.
Love gives us the confidence to keep moving on. When experienced well, it puts in us a belief in conquering especially when we know someone else believes in us. They say that it becomes an illusion to the man who has not experienced love.
Love means different things to each of us. Some call it shit. Others say it is overrated. Others don’t even believe it does exist. I don’t blame anyone on this because over time, I have realized that love is a composition of transitions.
When it works well with us, and with the right people, love moves mountains inside of us. It gives us a reason for living one more day. At that point, we sing praises about it and humanly glory in its splendor. We have every reason to do so.
At times when it doesn’t work well with us, we live in denial that love is just a four-lettered word. I have been in these stages and so have you I suppose. And we can come to a single conclusion that it is the same love that proved us wrong at the end of the day.
How do we express and experience love?
In the greatest planetary stories of the ages, it took an act of love for Jesus to leave the heavenly throne to come and die for the salvation of sinners. Love is so deep and great that none of us can express it. Taking up the death penalty for the deserved wrongdoer is not a lightweight thing to do but the ultimate expression of what love ought to be.
We try to express and experience love in a lessened value through acts of kindness, care, patience, and understanding. Have you ever felt very mad about someone and when you get to see them all the madness goes away probably after you try to put yourself in their shoes?
Think of when you get moved by a person in need who may sometimes not even be a loved one. What pushes you to lend them a hand of help? It is the unexplainable thing that is called love. Love makes us do things that otherwise seem so foreign and strange.
We can argue that true love in the context of a relationship between two people of the opposite sex may not exist, which is aptly wrong, but we must agree that love exists in the human heart. Love for fellow human beings on the bare minimum then.
I may discredit the point that Valentine’s Day is the day to celebrate love. I may strongly disagree with those who believe in the day to this day but I believe in love. To mean that love is more than the day. We don’t celebrate our love in the context of another’s. We celebrate our love uniquely as it is to us. In other words, I do believe in love in its entirety but not Valentine’s Day.
This love is what I call on us today and every single day. Even as we near the August eight election date, let love rule supreme. Let us remember that this love we want to celebrate so much more on this day should be celebrated daily. It should constantly be on our top lists and our heads always.
Let love rule the airwaves always and every single day.