Intertwining roots of emotion

Love

&

Fear

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Love & Fear ~

I have been thinking lately about love and fear; how similar they are and yet also entirely different. Two sides of a most important coin when it comes to the emotions we experience in our lives. It was Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who said, “Deep down, at our cores, there are only two emotions: love and fear.” In what was the epilogue of a television show I watched recently something was said that struck me. It was this, both love and fear involve the relinquishment of logic, a willing renouncement of reasonable patterns. We must either yield to it or fight it, there really are not any other options and that both are needed to maintain any reasonable sanity. This last part really struck me; that we need both to maintain any real sense of sanity. This made sense to me, yet it made me think differently than I had before. Of course, it sounds great to be able to go through life without ever experiencing fear of any kind but how much could we genuinely appreciate love if that were the case? 

Fear destroys. Love creates.

Fear tightens. Love releases.

Fear breeds domination. Love breeds cooperation.

Fear hesitates. Love acts.

It is interesting that when you write it down on paper these two feelings appear so incredibly opposite of each other and yet when you are caught up in them they can seem to mimic each other. I know there have been relationships where I have experienced this. Sometimes even falsely believing that the two feelings could coexist. I do not believe this is possible as love will always move you forward while fear will always pull you back. If you are experiencing both simultaneously sooner or later, you will be torn apart. As they say somethings gotta give.

As I was pondering these ideas there were two songs that came to my mind repeatedly: “Love and Fear” by Lisa Ritchie and “End Up Alone” by Alanna Matty. I have listened to both of these songs many times; in fact, I wrote a piece on “End Up Alone” earlier this year. Despite that fact these tracks suddenly took on a whole different meaning for me as these thoughts swirled around in my head. This speaks to how brilliantly they are written as they possess this ability to form and shape to your current emotions.

Love and Fear

I have no idea whether anything I will talk about played any part in the formation of this song's lyrics whether or not that is the case I found there are lyrics which illustrate my ideas.

“…Post on the days that I'm doing well

Drink on the nights that it hurts like hell

Only my friends are the ones who can tell

I'm at war within myself

Cuz all my love is telling me that

Maybe I should give you one more chance

All my fears are yelling 

What's the point you'll just let me down again

All I want, is just to have you here

Have my love outweigh my fear

But my fears were always right

So I had to cut the ties”

When listening to this song as I was writing this the line “I’m at war within myself” suddenly seemed to penetrate me to my core and to me it expresses this struggle you would go through experiencing both love and fear as I mentioned earlier. You are trying to reconcile these two emotions but ultimately realize that you just cannot, no matter how bad you may want it or wish that the situation could be different. As is expressed in the lyrics that begin with “All I want…” You have finally convinced yourself that you must end things and you must go through with it. It has often been quite a struggle for me to get to that point but once I do there is this near unwavering conviction and finality to the decision. But with such strong emotions involved there is still that shred of doubt. Even after you have gone through with it you spend some time questioning whether it was the right thing as you strive to rectify the conflicting emotions inside yourself. The difficulty of this inner conflict is illustrated so eloquently in Lisa’s poetic lyrics; you should listen to the song rather than reading my wordy rambling.

End Up Alone

“End Up Alone” is just magnificent, I thoroughly enjoy it and I do not know what else I can say on that front. I really enjoy how music not only means different things to different people but how it can also mean different things to the same person depending on what they are feeling at the time. I have listened to this track over five hundred times, yet the following ideas never came to me until I was listening in preparation for writing this post. When combined the words written and music behind them mean infinitely more than they would on their own. As I listened, I thought about how the song illustrates what it is like to be with someone but not have them actually present. Just because you are in a relationship with a person does not mean that you cannot feel incredibly and completely alone. One of the reasons you may stay in such a situation could be due to this tug of war between love and fear about which I am talking. Emotions my friends, they cause you to do crazy things sometimes positively so sometimes not. 

Also, this time around this track communicated to me how quickly relationships can change or end; one minute you are with someone and then suddenly you are not. You are left to deal with the severe emotional whiplash which you are hit with. Love and fear run deep like the intertwining roots of all emotion. They seem to require the same level of intimate involvement and they both give things in our life significance. Laozi said that when you establish concepts like love you also establish their negation and opposition. I found all this fascinating to think about and appreciated the new thoughts I was able to glean from these exceptional pieces of music.