Love’s Worth

026 math

I was twenty-five when I first met her,
twenty-eight when we first became lovers,
and at thirty I managed to admit
I was completely in love with the One. 

The last four years I’ve spent wishing for things:
us to meet younger in life, and more, for
smarter men wouldn’t have wasted such time,
never have lived love – life – out of order.

Finally I’ve learned what I’ve earned: I wouldn’t
have been wiser of love’s worth for cheaper.

~

I believe I understand something about how our symbols, our communication, our lives, are related to our experience of meaning and significance; this is why intimate, loving relationships are so important to us, because in loving so deeply we can touch something transcendent in an experience of something greater than our mundane selves.

Indeed, I have learned love’s worth well enough not only to know I’ll never let it go, but also to wish I had known its worth and had more of it in the past. Yet when examining this desire to change my personal history, to redact my life and my love, I discovered I only wanted to know then what I know now, not to have learned what I’ve already learned and so now know. (It’s very much the same difference between wanting to know a language and wanting to learn a language.) The problem with this is that it is the very process of learning the love’s worth which makes it significant and meaningful; if I just knew the facts without having to have learned them, then I wouldn’t know their worth, I wouldn’t attach to those facts about love such significant value as I do.

Intellectually I have always known I should not want to change my past because doing so would change the meaning and significance, the happiness and the person I am now. Yet it wasn’t until I realized I couldn’t separate the knowledge I learned from my learning experiences that those twenty-five plus years weren’t merely wasted but had sudden and significant value as an experiential process of learning worth.

Perhaps we value (things) because we learn (those things), because we differentiate (those things), because we intuit (those things), because we have lived the process of valuing (those things).