I am a Tiger and Tigers bite

When you're a kid, you soak everything up. Everything, and I mean everything, appeals to your senses and like a sponge, you soak it all up. There's experiences where you form understandings. Then there are the times when you do actually choose to open your stubborn angst-filled ears, you listen, and the words like gentle rhythms strike a harmony with which they resonate as concrete truth. As a young person in this modern world, your youth is where you learn, stumble, get up, and fall over again and all the while learning through every step. And all the while, this is what is expected of you.

But then you hit your twenties. And for some reason, you assume you're done with learning. Now maybe it's due to our formal processes of learning- where at some point you end your schooling, you graduate, and with that diploma you assume you're entitled to a time off from learning. But then, you get slapped. Hard. Reality sinks in, and slowly, or maybe even very quickly, you realize that your twenties is a time of relearning. Or maybe a better way of putting it, is that your twenties is that time frame in which everything you've learned prior gets an integrity test. Call it the stage in the formal Scientific process, where the lessons you had learned in your teens (the hypothetical stage) gets thrown into reality and it's literal value is experimented upon. Sometimes, the proverbs you have ascribed to like, "Do unto others," or "Love conquers all," or even, "With a college degree," prove themselves true, but most times, they just render themselves as porous fantastic hypthosises. 

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When I was young, I was lucky in a sense. My family wasn't one who spent the word "love" on one another. Growing up in America, especially in the '90s, where the Baby-boomers and the Gen X/Y'ers were dealing with their tangled webs, love was and still is a very iconic word. And I attribute it, maybe ignorantly, to being from an immigrant family from a third-world country, but my family hadn't had the luxury, as of yet, to really settle their feet and have the otium, or time, to define what love would mean, and better yet, how to share it in words.

Now, don't get me wrong. Though the word LOVE was not said in my household, there were and still are egregious amounts of generosity, kindness, hopefulness, and faith exchanged within my family. There are so many things done for one another and each other that connect us in non-verbal signifiers, where without doubt the presence of love, or something similar, does exist.

But for me, and those like me, we are stuck in a really interesting place. For we both have experienced love, physically, from our families, but still yet, our interpersonal languages have not been scored that way. But in contrast, we are growing up in the Modern 'Western World' where that word is both in heavy supply while in equal demand. I, like many first generation born, have to find a way to understand the past, while breaking through to the possibilities of the future.

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I guess I made a broad statement earlier about learning. The reason it was broad, is because I was attributing the supposed learning curve of the "terrible twenties," and attributing it to everyone. But in all actuality, I can only suppose such things, because my twenties have been such an acute learning experience. I myself have found everything I have learned in previous years coming under both scrutiny and question, all-the-while having to deal with my own epistemology and the values thereof. Basically, the last seven years have been one serious bitch. But, and maybe naively so, I'm grateful. Because along the way, I can selfishly say, I have come to understand that words have values, and in different lights, those words exhale a changing color.

But, and maybe as always, back to love. In other languages, such as Hebrew, we are taught that our rendition of love is lazy. In other forms, there are specifics that can change both the definitive and the phonetic structure of "love" - amore, agape, In Bulgarian there's like eighteen different variations of saying I love you … these are examples where love can be attributed to a specific set of signifiers. Yet, in English, we're just stuck with one common word: love.

We all know that there's this critical, call it Academic or Left, way of thinking, that looks down on American sensibilities. I know I am guilty of such thinking. And in that vein, it's easy to be critical of the English language, and in this case, the laziness we have in how we speak and afford love. We say, "Hot damn, I love that chicken cordon bleu," or "Jesus Jesse, I love Breaking Bad," or even more so, "I love the way that dress sits on you. It's the way it looked on Jennifer Anniston in that one episode of Friends, and I just love that show, and I just so love her, and oh my gosh, I just so love you." In those three statements while all in one single breath, the lynchpin has been love. Yet for such a phantasmic word, its limits know no ends.

Again, it would be easy to be so critical of such a limitless stretch. Yet, I would offer a different perspective. Now it's not that I wouldn't disagree and say, many a times, like in how the word "epic" or "impossible" or even "awesome", words and their pedigree have come under a severe bastardization, so to has love. But what I would proffer, is that there is something about the word love that if we forget to see, then we forget the beauty within both language, and more importantly, within each other.

I grew up with the Bible so I'm going to offer it via the perspective of a Beatitudinal range. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus offers up eight situations that love can be attributed to: i.e. Love is Patient, Love is Kind, so on an so forth. Now many of us have heard this, and maybe not exactly with the same religious rigor, but we've come to learn that our understanding of love falls within these limits.

But what I would offer is that it's not within these succinct limits in which Christ was offering us something profound, but the fact that love itself is likened to a sponge. Earlier I spoke on how as teenagers, they themselves soak up the world around them. But now I would hopedly offer that love, in a very relational set, is likened to a sponge. "Love is saying I'm an Idiot and I will always be sorry and I now know what it means to truly forgive," "Love is knowing you will make mistakes, but so will I. Let us find the bridge between." "Love is not just gracious, it is not just kind, it is those things when all opposition is stacked up against you and me independently, and it is the space where we will choose to continue to accept the other," "Love is knowing we will both change, and yet we'll offer each other the latitude where change is natural and therefore okay." There is a vacuous personal weight behind this word. And when shared with another, not only are we offering ourselves, but hopefully, with the potency of weight behind it, we are sacrificing ourselves.

I am only twenty-seven and have so much more to learn. I would like to hope that my terrible twenties are almost said and gone, and that I can and will look back on a time that though I stumbled terribly, it was both romantic and necessary. And throughout all the footholds that tripped me up, I was able to discover something impressive about love and what it means. Or, you know what,  who knows. Maybe I'll just realize it's all a bunch of dead potted meat.  Or even, love and everything supposedly good really is a dead seed spat out by an old maid as they stand on high looking out over the endless world all the while laughing in its decay. I guess I'll just have to report back on this once I get out of these damned twenties and get into the terrible thirties.  Till then, can I get one more beef patty and coco bread in the New Jerusalem.

I am a Tiger and Tigers bite ;)

WIthout Relent,

Peace

Remoy