Love

A conversation with a young teenager reciting her story of her first 'Love' and breakup made me remember my days of school, college and those years when almost everything we did came under the category of love...and while I tried explaining to this little one that probably the term she wanted to use was really liked she did insist upon it being love.

Having seen my fair share of relationships, family, friends, enemies, romantic, lustful and some that can not be classified...i feel the best example to understand love is to study maternal love. For rest of the relationships add different flavor to love itself be it fun, or romantic fervour for it to be hard to pin-point what exactly could be called the essence of love.

The maternal relationship however focusses on one core aspect, dedication, devotion, caring, sacrifice. It essentially defines that to have loved you have to give yourself away as much as possible and then some more.

That is why the Sufi saints can talk of romantic relationships in the context of religion for the examples they cite don't talk about the romance or the lust of the relationship but of the devotion and sacrifice in them.

And so be true for anything if you want to identify whether it has reached the depths of love is to understand how much you have given yourself to the other person or the cause...