Love life and loving life: making it one and the same

I am driven. Academically, speaking I want to learn as much as I possibly can and work towards as many degrees as I can. Creatively speaking, I want to explore as many facets of self expression as I have the time alotted. Recreationally, I love love love dancing! And conversing! And laughing!

What else would be the driving force for all of these activities in my life? The answer is simple: love. Yes, we have all read, watched, breathed, love stories . But how many of us consider that your relationship with your own life a love story in and of itself? With ebbs and flows just like the most famous love stories in history. Here's the thing that gets me too about all this, they're only stories. Whose to say they were ever really real? Whose to say that have a love life with another person and loving the life you have with them is not the same or as valuable as being in love with your life?

I can see that my point can start to get a little cloudy the more I try to assert what I really intend to. To be honest maybe I jumped the gun when I decided to tackle this frontier...I for one have not really figured out yet just what it means to have a love for my life the way I know what it means to have a love life. Daunting as it may be, I won't allow myself to continue to not know anything for very long. Life is short, it's shorter than short.

Which lead me to think, that maybe in or out of a relationship it is always possible to have a love life. Think about how much time is invested in falling in love. It's time consuming, it rents space in your head. It demands bodily reactions, some voluntary (come on, you know what I mean) some not. It consumes. It takes on a life of its own. There, right there. That's the point I'm trying to make. Falling in love creates a whole new life to tend to. In my mind then it's fair to say that those of us who are not in a relationship and are allowing their time to be consumed by some other passion or recreation are in fact very much having a love life.

How often do you hear people telling you they love their lives? How less often do you hear people saying they love their wives? For the sake of that rhyme I didn't add any other relationship titles, but the idea applies to all! I do know this though, falling out of love is always painful. Falling out of love with your life is more devastating. Lets resolve then to keep working at it. To keep pushing for only the most fulfilling love lives. That over used expression often heard from the mouths of those who are falling out of love " I don't deserve this!" Lets have that same attitude towards our own lives, refusing to settle in a loveless life on the daily.

In the same way the heart does not actually look like those cute geometric shapes we have all learned it to be, love may actually not be spelled l-o-v-e, maybe it's w-o-r-k or maybe it's e-f-f-o-r-t. Whatever the spelling, the definition is the same. So..how's your love life?