All You Need Is Love

The most important parts of the most important concepts can sometimes be distilled down to just a few or one element of those grander schemes. The search for Truth, the struggle to keep a crying baby calm or the endless waiting on the highway when driving to your girlfriend’s house. Even larger problems of how to convince a country to conserve its natural resources or how to bring together the Jews and the Palestinians can be broken down into concepts so basic that their revelation is as bright as a seagul resting on a deep blue ocean.

It’s Love.

John Lennon immortalized this clarification with the worldly concept, “All you need is love.” And billions of humans have rocked to these words and basked in the glow of such an obvious solution to the world’s problems.

But passion gives way to reason and other things come to light. In a relationship, for example, is the presence of Love enough? Or is Love the most complex and intricate way to torture yourself when things aren’t working? If she is considerate and you appreciate that, does that erase the fact that you have different taste in books? If you bring her flowers, and you write her poetry, will that erase her being annoyed by your bad habits? Does she fill your life with happiness and purpose even after she makes you feel horrible about yourself? If she loved you, and you her, and now she’s out of love, but you aren’t, what does that say about her? What does that say about you?

The concept of Love is simple and elegant, a co-mingling of spirits, fitting together, reinforced by a physical touch and words that move each other deeply. But as has been said before, “The Devil’s in the details.” And in some ways, the concept is divorced from reality.

So who’s right? Does the murder of a loved one prevent you from loving that murderer? Do political differences pale in the face of an expressed desire to love one another? Can a concept shake the concrete root of real problems? Maybe so, maybe if the people involved feel that the desire for Love is stronger than the desire to right each other’s wrongs. I’m half idealist/half realist. All of me wants the Love. I yearn for the closeness of the one I love. My life has little perceived meaning without the one that I love. But Love is the solution and the problem, the enabler and the torturer, for the details are a yoke around our necks. And if one, but not the other, will let those fade into the background, Love can never glow in the foreground. I just hope one day that it will. Because I miss the one I love, and I want her back for Love is all we need.