Love at 40 and its celebration

(From a friend who found her soulmate at 40 and wants to share this anonymously. Picture courtesy: qthomasbower)

Love is in the air this Valentine’s Day. Is it then? Are we breathing it in or breathing it out? Do we really know what love is? How much does the cupid’s arrow have anything to do with love?

What the cupid’s dart does to us is probably give us a romantic experience which can make a 40 year old mother of two feel like a 16 year old schoolgirl, pimples and zits testimonial to the endorphins that burst out of nowhere! Yes, I have experienced that kind of exuberant, glowing feeling recently. And all thanks to a prominent and safe internet dating site which kept my identity guarded till I actually chose to reveal myself to the person I chose to connect with after ensuring all kinds of credibility and what not.

It has been ten amazing and uplifting months since I connected with my soulmate and found the appreciation, adulation, respect and understanding which was non existent in my life for forty years.

To discover that there is another who could complement me, accept me the way I exist and make me laugh, was a challenge well tried by this unassuming, straightforward, witty and creative man who, incidentally is a decade younger than I am.

Speculative? Will it work or not? Who knows… There are questions in our lives we sometimes cannot answer. The best way is to go with the flow. It hasn’t been easy. Introspection of all sorts within ourselves has been turning the past almost a year into quite a pickle, considering how we are both placed socially. But the equation that we have is undeterred. And the bottom line is we both feel we have come home now. Where and when the structural home exists, we both do not know. We do know though we were cosmically united, after endless battles we had with life, and now there’s harmony, and peace and the sun shines, and the sky is blue, the grass greener than ever. Sharing and experiencing together and knowing we mirror each other’s reflections is the realization we have unearthed after plunging several depths together.

Having narrated the story of this unusual romance that has come my way, I also feel that love has various connotations. To me, love is accepting and empathizing. It starts with my children every day, to the women who help me with domestic chores, to my driver, to the chowkidaar (guard), to the vegetable seller who affectionately calls me “aunty” for lack of better language skills, and with whom I never fail to share a joke or laugh in the morning, and to my dhoban, who has a polio stricken foot and to whom i personally deliver my laundry.

Sharing a smile and bringing a twinkle to my eye are always the urchins on the street, with whom I share a dialogue, even though I cannot speak much of their language. And also, the hundreds of little children I have met in my life, from all walks of life, love to me is bringing a smile on their faces, hugging my friends, young and old, not just politeness towards elderly neighbours, but sitting and talking to them in the park.

Love, to me is reaching out where people generally think twice before touching. Love to me is giving up assumptions of religion, region, caste, wealth. Its the joy of touching someone’s life, very simply.

In the end, this song comes to my mind, to really celebrate this day of pyaar, ishq, mohabbat, and all the synonyms of LOVE that exist…..that “pyaar baant te chalo”…..by Kishore Kumar.