by

51 Years, 9 Months, and 4 Days of Love

Hello from Melbourne, Australia. I left Sydney last Thursday after staying there for almost one month. I made some new friends through my friend as well as through Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I miss them all already.

But after all, leaving people is part of a journey and you can’t stay together forever with anyone, not even with yourself: you’re going to die someday.

This is a reminder to myself as well as a message to you. Each moment comes and goes and what you do about it is up to you. So is each meeting.

I think this is the 4th or 5th time I’ve been to Melbourne. Or maybe more. But definitely less than 8 times. And I’ve never been here more than 2 weeks. The thing is, though, there is something magical about Melbourne and I’m glad to be back here.

After 11 hours of a train ride, I got to Southern Cross Station, and the weather wasn’t that good, but even that can be charming and it was charming to experience the Melbourne weather.

I had a brief catch up with my old friend from Canberra, who is now based in the UK and visiting Australia. I ran into another friend of mine. I had a good training session at a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu gym in the city. Now I’m crashing at a good friend’s place. People. People. People. I know I know, I meet them and I leave them, but they live inside me.

Speaking of people and meeting and leaving, I finished reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel “Love in the Time of Cholera” this afternoon.

In this story, Florentino Ariza falls in love with Fermina Daza, but she eventually chooses to marry another guy. Florentino doesn’t give up his love for Fermina; he chooses to wait for her husband to die and for her to be a widow, for 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. It’s a long love story, and in fact, it’s a collection of love stories in one man’s life. This book explores different kinds of love and relationship, so if you enjoy the things I talk about in this blog (i.e. love and relationship and life!) and you’ve never read it, I highly recommend it.

I have to say that love is something we seem to understand intuitively (and we do understand it from a scientific perspective these days), but I think there is something more to it and I’m inclined to think that we, human beings, don’t really know what’s going on. So, given my inclination to think that way and the conviction that love is something really, really important to us, I believe it’s worthwhile to have a beginner’s mind about love and to try to understand it better. It’s a personal mission of mine, but I invite you to join me as well.

It might take a couple of years or more than 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days to go beyond some possible collective bullshits that our ancestors attributed to the notion of love and that we have been told to believe, or we might find out that what I just called collective bullshits are actually correct and no bullshits.

Either way, I gotta examine it on my own and you gotta do it if you are curious about and want to be good at the art of loving too.

The art of loving. Yes. It’s an art form.