Lost Love

Day one of my October Blog Marathon, where hopefully I will be able to blog every single day for the next month using suggestions made by six friends. Each friend has given me five subjects to blog about, and for the first block of five subjects, my good HPANA buddy Maria is responsible. Her first suggestion was, as you can guess from the title, 'Lost Love'.

Hoo boy.

I could get very serious here and ramble about heartbreak, sad songs, despair, doom and gloom, and I could probably do fairly well with it, but I prefer to keep the dark and depressing stuff for my stories, so instead I'm going give things a little Tara Twist (which I know you were probably expecting anyway).

When you speak of love, it can mean many things. The most obvious is the love that you feel for a spouse or a partner, the love for your children, or the love for your family or friends. This is the more serious love, and it's the love that keeps most people going. It's also, in my humble opinion, the true meaning of the word 'love'.

I use the word 'love' on a daily basis, and I use it for all sorts of things. I could be telling one of my writing friends that I loved their latest chapter, I could be telling my kids that I love them, or I could be talking about the latest book that I loved. I could be raving on about a particular chocolate bar, or talking about my favourite meal.

Do you see where I'm going here?

Now I'm not saying that I don't mean it when I say these things, because I do. I happen to love roast beef flavoured Monster Munch, for example, and I also love my children. But the love I have for a packet of crisps doesn't compare with the love that I feel for my kids now, does it? I'm pretty sure I could live without my Monster Munch (although I would miss them. Actually, I have lived without Monster Munch because they stopped producing them for a good number of years, and only brought them back recently), but I couldn't live without my kids.

So what does this have to do with the theme of 'lost love'? Well, we all use the word 'love' for all kinds of things, and I think in the process we have watered down the full meaning of the word. Love, in my humble (and probably insane) opinion, is one of the most powerful emotions that humans have, and is supposedly the one thing that separates us from the animals. Every living creature has basic survival instincts - the urge to find food, water, a place to sleep, and the drive to create the next generation. Yup, even us humans can all be brought down to the same level of basic urges. But what keeps us apart from the beasts is our ability to form relationships, our ability to 'love'. In using the word 'love' to cover anything from our feelings for our kids to our feelings for a snack, we are somehow belittling the very thing that makes us human.

I think, somehow, that most of us has lost the true meaning of love. And that's a sobering thought.

Note: Blogger is being all pantsy and won't let me upload any pictures. I'll try again later.