About love

Today i was thinking about love and trust. I remembered a long lost book, one i came across in my 11th grade, when i was 16, 20 years ago, in a philosophy class during a sunny spring day. I do remember how the day was. We had been studying Descarte and getting ready to move to some more heavy stuff from the germans. Never understood them very well, i think philosophy and german are not compatible words. Our teacher though that she should give us a break and read us some parts of that book. If you know the book i don't need to tell you the name, if you don't them find it (or ask me, i will tell you). That book is about love with some Socratic perspectives (always my favorite cave). That teacher tried to convince me to leave maths and change to human studies, maybe she was right. She was young and very different from the other i had next year.

The other was the broom stick mother of a friend, and sister of a departed friend. We shared the love for cotton and spinning. Is daughter was also in my class that year, she's my age. He, and his younger brother, trusted me a very big part of their lives and also the faith of many people that worked for them. I am now much richer because of them. I earned the respect of many because of them. He was one of the first persons i told i was going to be a father. He sold a machine to another factory and i went there with him to prepare delivery, assembly and teaching of the new operators. He was driving us back wen i told him. He just looked at me, made a very big from the heart smile, braked and forgot about the road. We almost crashed.

The book is about breaking barriers and love and freedom. Breaking from the cave shadows and looking at the real concepts. Truth is always a perfect concept that must live in the kingdom of outside. Truth is never a shadow on the wall. Only our interpretation of the truth is what we can achieve to and, in our relations with others, we must take that into account. One of the most strong ideas, at least fro me, of that book is that love is also freedom. You can't love someone if you don't let him go.

I talked about trust, truth, freedom and love but never got to the point. I will try to be more clear now with couple of questions. "Can love exist without trust?" Everybody will rapidly say, "NO, of course". But why?

Really, is very simple. If you trust someone to let him go his way, if you trust is freedom, them, maybe, just maybe, if you are bound to walk together, he will choose to walk with you. Those are the friend we make. You can't impose a friendship, friendship is freely given and taken. Then i asked myself "What is the difference between love and friendship?". I was tempted to say the level of emotions, the degree of feeling, but that would just be to easy. No, the answer must be other. There must be more things involved. I think love, the big love, as in "amor português" or "l'amour francais", is a friendship with passion.

Once, in those long gone days, after studying one sonnet about love, the one that starts with "O amor é um fogo que arde sem se ver..." (love is a fire that burns invisible) and goes on like that in 12 lines, we where asked to define love. At the time i couldn't. For many years i tried to find my answer to that question. Many times i felt near and failed. I found my answer today.

"Love is trusting the freedom of other with your passion."

I guess it's a nice definition. Clean, clear, strong and with the necessary touch of poetry.