Falling in Love: Part Eighteen: Marc Gafni
“Joy whose hand is ever at his lips, Bidding adieu.” (Keats)
Suddenly finding ourselves having to work for what was first experienced as a gift of magical purity can be infuriating, until we realize that losing paradise is not a cruel personal punishment: it is the essential pattern of the universe. Reality demands that the heightened perception and promise of the initial encounter fade.
What today is ecstasy, tomorrow is routine. The pattern of all human experience is that when the freshness of the encounter recedes, that which so seduced our palate and arrested our vision just a short time ago becomes mundane.
The Kabbalists explain that in allowing us to fall in love, the universe presents us with a gift — the ability to feel a reality that is not ours by right. We are not yet sufficiently skilled to derive pleasure from the experience for we have not earned it.
Pleasure is always a function of invested effort.
The ability to earn something — to make it ours by right — is the great privilege granted to us by a loving cosmos. Anything we don’t earn we do not truly enjoy. That is a metaphysical law of the universe.
Yet even before earning it, we are given the gift of love, at least for a while. The reason is that the radical clarity and certainty of this “arousal from above” then becomes a shining buoy to which we can anchor our lives. It shows us the inner nature of reality. It whispers that existence is an erotic delight.
We perceive a glimpse of the mystery in all of its wonder. We touch the interconnectivity of being. We taste the sweetness of intimacy which is shared identity. For a short time, we are transported to the other side. We see the world with God’s eyes. We know that all the perceptions of the first flush of love are true. By love’s light and vision, we can navigate the currents of uncertainty and the deadening numbness of ennui. The memory of first love lights the path for a return to love.
Marc Gafni
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