Love and Desire and Fear of Loss

W. H. Auden: “If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me”, (THE MORE LOVING ONE). 

Augustine wrote that love is “a kind of motion, and all motion is toward something.” 

What makes us move into the direction of something is our graving to possess this something which we deem as Good. We want this good for we hope it will make us happy and it is because we know happiness that we want to be happy. The distinctive trait of this good that we desire is that we do not have it. Once we have the object our desire ends, unless we are threatened with its loss. In that instant our desire to have turns into the fear of loosing.

A generous and unpossessive love seems to be almost impossible. Those who are able to love in this way are short of superhuman. A love which relies on possession, though, inevitably turns into fear, the fear of losing what was gained.

A known cure/ prevention for heartbreak is the acceptance that all things are perishable and therefore even love ought to be met cautiously and nonattachment might be advised. Even the greatest love exists only for a time.

So long as we desire temporal things, we live constantly under the threat of loosing them and so the future, unknown, threatening, strips the present moment of its calm, and we are unable to enjoy it. The future destroys the present because we allow it. 

The trouble with human happiness is that it is never stable, it is constantly at war with fear, the fear of loss. Death is the ultimate loss, of life and love and it is the deep source of our fear. Life’s mode of living, since we know it will end sometime, irrefutably, is that of constant worry. 

So it would seem that to get rid of fear, of worry, we simply would have to aim for freedom from fear. Only in the calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future are we able to experience this fearlessness. So time is an important agent. Cast aside the future and focus on the present. Only the present, the Now, is real, things in the past and things in the future are not.

Like lives, like books, like the universe itself, love is finite, always. It is sad but it is like it is. Once we accept this we are prepared to plunge into the next adventure and try, again, to find love, for a limited time. So there is no use in fearing the future and let it spoil the moment. Rather live the moment, live the beautiful experience of being bound to someone, of loving someone, as long as it lasts, enjoy it. This is what it means with Now. Now then becomes strangely, not now, but outside now, the fleeting moment of simultaneous past and present. Time stands still, becomes eternity, becomes hope and promise, becomes happiness.

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