How long will I love you ? As long as stars are above you. And longer, if I can.
Ellie Goulding
In the quaint 2013 British film, About Time, we meet young Tim from Cornwall, socially awkward and innocent in love. On his 21st birthday his father informs him that, like all males in his family, he possesses the ability to travel back in time. What will he do with this newly discovered gift? He sets out to find love.
Tim quickly discovers that despite his newfound ability, love eludes him. When he does eventually meet and marry an adorable woman, it is not because of, but in spite of, his metaphysical powers. Indeed, after several years of sweet and touching manipulations of time in order to experience the narrow, mundane notion of love he has imagined, he at last resolves to surrender to time, renouncing time travel altogether. He realises that by living every day as though he himself had chosen it among all the possible days available to him, he actually finds peace, and love. He realises, as we all are realising, each at our own pace, that the meaning of time is not to find the love that we are looking for, but to let love find us.
When does love begin ?
I remember my first love as though it were yesterday. All of 12 years old, the neighbour girl knocked me down one day in the schoolyard. As she pinned my shoulders to the ground with teasing laughter, my heart exploded in my chest. Electric sensations spread through my arms and legs. When they receded, I looked up and saw my beloved’s angel-like face: I was in love.
Did love begin that day in the schoolyard? I thought so because for a brief moment on that day, the rest of the world ended. For a brief moment there was nothing in the universe but that love I felt. My body was love, my mind was love, my heart was love.
Older now, I understand that I did not find love in the playful grip of the neighbour girl that day. Love found me. The love that had been sleeping in my heart found a path to my senses and to my mind. I became aware of my naturally loving soul. Love did not start that day. I became aware of the love that had been waiting in my soul. How long had it been waiting? Forever.
We do not spontaneously start loving by turning on some love-switch in our hearts. Nor does the object of our love have access to such a switch. Love is always living in us, in our souls, an expression of the ocean of love which is the divine. It is not a matter of starting to love, or stopping. It is a matter of letting flow the love that has always already been there. It is a matter of realising that love is not what we have, it is what we are.
‘The soul exists forever in the present’, we read in Bhagavad-gītā, ‘having no birth or death’. In essence, all spirituality starts with this idea. In the same way, love is not created, and love is not destroyed. The love inherent in us flows like an endless river, forever present, sometimes more, sometimes less intensely.
What regulates this intensity? Is it the material attractiveness of the other ? Her physical beauty? His exquisite charm? No, the intensity of our love depends on the depth of our understanding of ourselves as loving beings.
Love has no cause because love has always been flowing, the eternal energy of the divine that lives in our hearts, lives in our souls, waiting patiently to be channeled in all its divinity.
Love has no time. Love never began, and will never end. Love has no time because the soul has no time. The love we feel has always been there, and yet we have not realised it. If my love is pure and true and real, it is self-less, ego-less, indifferent to the give-and-take of the material world. It is a servant of nothing but love itself.
We spend lifetimes, like the hero of our film, using our powers, be they mundane or magical, in order to bring the world into line with our idea of what is lovable. From this we suffer endlessly. We must instead, like Tim, surrender to time. We must understand that nothing that is real ever changes, that what is truly real is outside of time. We must realise that those who love in time love what is changing, ephemeral, impermanent. They love an illusion : here and gone …in a moment.
When we are ready we will realise that true love is love of the soul of the other, eternal and always already perfectly lovable, just like our own, no matter what material form it may take, now or later.