A World of Questions

Does loving every person the same way, in an equal measure, mean the same thing as not loving any person wholly?

Why should one person be loved more than the other? 
Does a blood relation call for extra affection? 
When a very close friend can cause, at times, more warmth in the heart than a blood relation, what exactly can be termed as the yardstick for expressing love?

****

Good books linger in your mind for a long time after you have read them. Great books lead to a barrage of questions to take birth as you read them.

Siddhartha written by Hermann Hesse was the cause for the above listed questions. And a lot many more.

The term love when spoken about by a person in his/her twenties is automatically attributed to the emotion that arises between two people of the same/opposite gender out of admiration, necessity or sometimes even something as simple as time and is considered as the basis for a long-term relationship.  And the attribution wouldn’t be a faulty one since most of the topics do in fact revolve around the aforementioned love.

But love, in the sense of life, has much more to it.

For instance, why should a son or a daughter love his/her mother?

Should the love exist because the mother continues to sacrifice innumerable things in her life for her unconditional love of the child? Wouldn’t the love of the son/daughter then become one that stems out of reciprocation?

Should the love exist because the mother is the first real companion at the start of life and remains a constant throughout the journey? Wouldn’t the love of the son/daughter then become one that stems out of time or in simpler terms, prolonged contact?

What really forms the basis of the love for a mother? Perhaps, considering for a moment that it is a question that should not be searched for an answer and moving to another important one, would it be an error to express the same amount of love towards another person?

What makes a mother special? What makes a father special? What makes a close friend special? What makes a romantic partner special? 

We like their habits. We like their positives. We learn to like their negatives. We like them for who they are.

But why should this love that we express so unconditionally be restricted to such a small group of people?

Would it be wrong if we start loving every person we meet in our life the same way as we would love our mother? Would it be wrong if every person we befriended became special as opposed to the one or two special people in our lives?

There would, of course, be a chance that the people who feel they are special and irreplaceable to us might be subjected to hurt since they would no longer be the only ones who are special. They would become one among a larger group.

But wouldn’t loving every person we come across in the exact same way, in an equal measure, irrespective of the blood relations and the friendships and the admiration and the necessities make our lives more beautiful?

The love that we express for every living being would become the same. The pain encountered for the loss of every living being would become the same. And in the onset of such conditions, the life that we would lead would be no more a life of the self. 
It would, instead, be a life filled with the lives of every other living being we encounter in our journey.

A life of others. 

A life of the universe, perhaps.

Sometimes, such deep explorations into the workings of life and love cause unwanted fear in the minds of people like it did to my mom when I gave her a brief explanation of my newly formed opinions/questions on love. Her spontaneous reply after hearing me out was,

“Dai! Saamiyaar aaga poriyaa nee?! 
Venaam da! Unna ivalo padikka vechirukken. Appidi laam ethum aagi vechiraathe da!”

I couldn’t control my laughter at her response for quite some time.

But then, a mother’s fear is a mother’s fear.

****

The world is filled with a majority of people who are of the opinion that life needs to be lived and not questioned. 

Yes. Very true indeed.

Life unveils itself more as we live it. 

But questions also do play their part in enriching the lives we live.

Who would meaning have to complement it, if not for questions?