Dear Roman, is love worth it after all?

You had this idea—to find somebody you love, something you love, and to work on becoming a good thing for it. Not the right thing. Not the perfect thing. But good. A good partner, a good student, a good follower.

This brings to mind the idea that love is the central engine by which all things run. Not that love is a means—love as a means to feel attraction and have sex and make babies. Not love as an end in itself—love as a beautiful thing to experience many times in your lifetime. But love as an engine.

I wonder if you see it this way—if this is an inspiration for your thoughts. If you had gone deeper into this. Love as inspiration. Love as motivation. Love as sustained reason for being, for perfecting, for persevering. For preserving.

I look back at my life, and everything I ever did I did for love. I look at the black parts of my life, and those parts were not black because objectively bad things happened to me—but because of some tarnishing of the idea of love in my heart. Either through heartbreak, loss, betrayal. Self-loathing through inadequacy in protecting those I purport to love. The blackening of the heart came from this. A thick black crust formed over the soft flesh. But you can’t get rid of the heart. It still has to pump blood. It still has to feel. It is just harder on itself now.

Do you think it is a coincidence, that the heart is the engine of the body? That without this little engine life stops? Stuff comes in—air comes in through the lungs—but it does not go anywhere without the heart.

And if this is an engine, can it be controlled? Can it be developed? Can you train yourself to love deeper? Shallower? Can you train yourself to convert love energy into other energy? Electrical energy? Mechanical energy? Can you channel it and shoot it out of your hands like lightning?

I imagine you have gotten deep into this in your investigations. I imagine there is potential in this framework. Can you view love as energy? Love is not the machine…but rather love is the energy that powers every other machine? When you feel toxic love…you can convert it into something else…or you can turn your attention to another love to cleanse the first…suddenly unsolvable problems become solvable. Problems of abandonment, disillusionment now have a new set of tools for their resolution. You are not at the mercy of love taking you over, like a typhoon. Rather you can have some amount of control over it without hardening yourself to it, like a circus master controlling a crew of wild animals around her, the monkeys and the elephants all while on a flying trapeze. It is not a repression of energy, but rather you guide it around you.