‘Love’

I have just watched a video which is called ‘Inspirational Love Scenes’ from films, this is the transcript which has inspired me to write a blog post:

Look, I guarantee there’ll be tough times. For a whole lot of reasons that don’t make sense to me. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life. And we are gonna last is just to love. Love is not a feeling, it’s an ability. I love you without even knowing how… or when… or from where.

I love how he makes me feel like anything’s possible. I think I’m in love with you. Oh. I can’t believe it. I’m in love. I love you so much. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride. Above all things, I believe in love. Cause you’re like the coolest person I’ve ever met. And you don’t even have to try. You’re the only one for me. Kiss me. Kiss me as if it were the last time. Why not? Life is short, life is dull, life is full of pain, and this is a chance for something special.

‘Love’ is such a strange emotion – if it is an emotion. It’s a word which is often used for some to explain the euphoric warmth they have when with another person or perhaps the feeling of owning a sentimental possession. However, the word  ‘love’ is commonly used, perhaps too tritely.

For me, ‘love’ is found over time… through developing emotions and getting to know a person who you feel happy around. A person who you can be comfortable with. However you look. However you feel. Whatever you say. Whatever you do. And all these little things won’t taint their love for you, as it’s so strong it’s unbreakable. It’s not a word which can be used and thrown away like any other word, it’s a word which has true meaning and one which everyone can relate to in one way or another.

Love is expressed from the inside, as the transcript says love is “not a feeling, it’s an ability” and I suppose it is, for me, it’s the ability to put all your complexities, insecurities aside and concentrate on how you feel about someone. Love doesn’t always make sense to everyone, it may not today. Tomorrow. The next day. Or even in the next year. However, one day everyone will find love in some way or another as “love truly is all around”.

It’s beneath that counts. Looks are deceiving.

"You know when sometimes you meet someone so beautiful and then you actually talk to them and five minutes later they're as dull as a brick? Then there's other people, when you meet them you think 'Not bad. They're okay.' And then you get to know them and their face just sort of becomes them, like their personality's written all over it. And they just turn into something so beautiful..."

“For in dreams we enter a world that is entirely our own”

Our dreams are essentially figments of our imagination, however despite how surreal some may be, they are real in the way they reflect how we may feel about something or even someone. Dreams are uncontrollable, ineffable and incoherent, however they still somehow make sense to us. Dreams have the ability to inspire us as they show us our potential and capabilities which we couldn’t have otherwise comprehended in true life. For instance, one may dream I become a successful Journalist (my wish) and this inspires me to yearn even more for this profession… Through the dream I experienced my happiness by watching events unfold.

Yes I agree dreams can be wacky and odd, however they shouldn’t just be dismissed as beneath the surface of our dreams we enter a world that is entirely our own and a world which no one else can quite comprehend. That’s what makes dreams individual… Each moment reveals another thing we never knew.

University

A BIG step in my life – in everyone’s life if they choose to apply. After many thoughts of where to apply, after many discussions of where’s best to apply, after research of different universities and after weighing up each… I have now sent of my UCAS application. Draft, after draft, after draft my Personal Statement is now out of my control and in the hands of my five choices to decide whether I’m a good enough applicant. Scared is not the word, I am petrified. Not only do I need offers, I need to achieve the grades at the end of A2 – pressure has never been so intense.

‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’ by Mitch Albom

First of all I had reservations about this book as I have never read a book quite like it. I have also never come across any of Mitch Albom’s books before, despite being informed by a friend that his books are meaningful. Since reading ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’, I am intrigued to read Albom’s other books due to how ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’ is written and the lesson which shone in the book.

The notion for ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’ is

“All ending are beginnings. We just don't know it at the time..."

Eddie, who is the main character, is a grizzled war veteran who feels trapped in a meaningless life of fixing rides at a seaside amusement park called ‘Ruby Pier’. As he grows older, he becomes more dissatisfied with his life, living a daily routine of work, loneliness, and regret. Out of the blue whilst at a ordinary day at work, an accident occurs where a cart falls from a ride endangering a young girl. Eddie attempts to save this girl, but dies himself on his 83rd birthday. He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not what it is said to be, instead it is a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five different people who were in it. The quote stated above (“All endings are beginnings…”) resounds throughout the book as each person he meets makes him rethink his life and realise that the end of his life is just the beginning to finding out what went wrong, and that there’s still optimism.

There are quotes which I adore from this book, such as:

“It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn’t just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.”

“When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole”

“”Strangers”, the Blue Man said, “are just family you have yet to come to know.””

“YOUNG MEN GO to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.”

“Lost love is still love, Eddie. It takes a different form, that’s all. You can’t see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.”

“That each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”

Albom for me, gives an astonishing original story which has changed my outlook on afterlife itself and ultimately, the meaning of our life here on earth. The book not only teaches about treasuring life itself, but it is also a fable of love, a warning about war, and a nod of the cap to the real people of this world, the ones who never get their names in lights.

Other books by Mitch Albom:

• ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’
• ‘For One More Day’
• ‘Have a Little Faith’
• ‘The Time Keeper’ (his newest work)

Critical praise:

“Five meetings, five different and surprising truths that gradually unveil to Eddie one of the basic truths of life – that nobody is an island.”
—Knihovnice

"There's much wisdom here . . . An earnest meditation on the intrinsic value of human life."
—Los Angeles Times

“The Five People You Meet in Heaven confirms Mitch Albom as a writer of worship who can reach millions of readers for his courage to openly ask questions about our existence"
—El Mundo