Strange Love

You see, I quite honestly believe that every stranger we pass on the street is a connection lost. Every stranger holds the potential to divert our direction, be it for a day or a lifetime. Call it the butterfly effect, sliding doors, whatever—it’s an idea that I find both incredibly liberating and terrifying at the same time.

Most people underestimate the significance of a moment. The paradox of a moment is that an instant in time can be more significant than the sum of all moments up until then.  [smd]

I've had this jittering anxiousness inside me.  It's this increasing desire, this internal force pushing me forward, this something directing me somewhere.  

Inexhaustible hunger.

I'm not talking about a physical hunger.  I'm not even talking about a spiritual hunger.  I'm talking about the gray in-between.  The physically spiritual; the spiritually physical.  That aching part of you, the rush of adrenaline in your blood, the kind of something inside you that lives and breathes for something more.  

Have you ever felt it?

I've had two friends go through some pretty tough breakups lately.  It's absolutely heartbreaking hearing their stories, wanting so badly to help but knowing it's something they have to work through. It's made me a mix of past, present and future.  Both nostalgic and prospective.  

This hunger, I think we all feel it.  Synonymous with love, we all crave it.  But alas, the question that holds us all back from a sort of satiety:

How do you find young love and avoid the breaking heart of lost love?  When do you decide that the greatness of flying is worth the risk of falling?  I hate that I feel so much for my broken friends.  Their heartbreak becomes mine.  How to you look beyond yourself and into the heart of someone else?

Ever so rarely, I fall hard and fast for someone.  Unquestioning, unreasonable, unpredictable.  This is my dilemma.  For in the broken love of others, I fear the stranger.

I suppose you could argue that these glorified strangers--the ones we fall for in fleeting silence--they're the necessary catalyst; it's as soothing as it is frustrating.  In that fleeting moment, he's everything you didn't know you've always wanted.

No matter what I say, what I do, I can't mend the hearts of my friends.  I can't discover my own stranger without a reciprocating curiosity.  My own apprehension to move forward stems from the heartbreak of my friends mixed with the possibility of an unexpected stranger becoming more.

So for all of you who have faced loss, all of you who have seen the effect of loss on others, and all of you who are given the chance of something more....

What do you do when the only one holding you back from possibility is yourself?  What makes you decide that the possibility of flying is greater than the risk of falling?

How do you help others when in the midst of it, you're still trying to figure out yourself?