Finding luck in love

#38: A 100-word description of the precondition for finding love

AN ANNOUNCEMENT!

Dear Readers: You may have noticed I skipped last Friday’s 100 word story. I’m creating a little more time for generative work and study, so my posts will now arrive every other week. My longer pieces will arrive slower as well.

I’d love to hear from you about how this is working - more, less, just right? Meanwhile, here’s this week’s 100-word piece.

AND A poem.

“Necessary and sufficient” PC: Reena Kapoor. Instagram: @1StarDusty

Finding luck in love

Find it in you to love. Someone, anyone who shines for you…

~If you’re lucky your love may be requited.
~With slightly more luck, you’ll profess your love to them and they’ll reciprocate.
~A bit more and you’ll be united with them.
~More luck will give you many years with them.
~Still more, and that love will transform you into a better you, the grace conferred for a lifetime…

Maybe some of this will happen for you, maybe much won’t. 
But, no matter what…YOU can love. That part isn’t luck. 

It’s also the precondition for the rest to follow.

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reena | 03.11.2024

'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

— Lord Alfred Tennyson (from a poem on grief In Memoriam A. H. H.)

I wrote the hundred words above last month and this month came a reminder of how little time we have to love.

On April 15th, my very dear friend Bob passed away. Bob was 87, led a meaningful and happy life and was surrounded by loved ones at his passing. His departure leaves a big hole. There are/will be obituaries and remembrances for Bob — he was well loved and accomplished in an illustrious career — but this is my personal remembrance of him. I know he’s up there reading this, making a humorous quip, perhaps on the irony of death arriving on “tax day,” and making everyone laugh!

The curious thing is I met Bob about 18 years ago—he a white, Jewish man, in his 70s, old enough to be my father and me an Indian woman, barely forty. And we struck up a beautiful and enduring friendship. We discussed everything from politics and economics to books and movies, TV shows, and art and a shared sense of a good life.

His formidable intellect and contributions in the field of history and economics was how I’d originally learned of him, and also how I met him. But after meeting him, it was his big affectionate heart and his always present sense of humor that endeared him as a friend. Friendship knows no distance of age, background or circumstance unless we choose to give those barriers permission. Luckily, neither Bob, nor I believed in nonsensical constructs of that sort.

…there really isn’t time enough for love but there is always time for love…

Yet I was aware of our difference in age and I worried about the time we had as friends. Thankfully, we came to have nearly two decades of friendship, and I’m eternally grateful for that. Bob and I got lunch every few months at our favorite sushi place and my husband and I got dinner with him and his wife a few times a year. He was “uncle Bob” to my daughter and always made her laugh. After his passing, I dug up a poem I’d penned back in 2011 about our precious friendship and how it was stacked against the inexorability of passing time.

I’m sharing that poem with you. It’s for any friendship, bond, love we choose to allow into our lives no matter the constraints. It’s my call to using love as the only instrument powerful enough to transcend our finitude. Thing is, there really isn’t time enough for love yet there’s always time for love.

If you’ve ever faced such a loss, I hope you’ll find some resonance here…

seeing you today

I can't help but fear that day
when you will be gone
or it might be me
no one with certainty can say 
but I fear our mortality 
when this warmth won't be here 
living, palpating, warming
like it did today.
You said you love my laugh
the one you compel so easily
the mirth of which must ring
on for eternity
in the name of all the ones 
who'll find such a bliss
I'll miss you when time does us 'part
But knowing there'll be others 
like us makes it easier 
to contemplate the many before us
So let me hold your hand, 
kiss your cheek and love you 
as I do and bask in what we have,
what we’ll leave behind — 
an echo, our laugh, this friendship!

###

reena | written after a lunch with one of my dearest friends "the old block" on July 15th 2011, slightly modified on April 16th 2024, a day after his passing.