Conversations For Transformation: Essays Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard

Conversations For Transformation

Essays By Laurence Platt

Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard

And More

For You I've Loved Before

Hagafen Cellars, Napa Valley, California, USA

August 15, 2010

"Always be open to being related to everyone you have been related to." ...		speaking with Laurence Platt in Visits With A Friend VI II (Open To Everyone)

This essay, For You I've Loved Before, is the companion piece to Open To Everyone.

It was written at the same time as Say The World Loves You.

Here's the truth for me about you I've loved before:

It's more than I still love you. It's I've never stopped loving you.

To be sure, some of our erstwhile relationship's parameters aren't the same as they used to be when we were together and in love. Geographical distances have increased between us to the point where seeing each other on a day to day basis simply isn't feasible any more. In some cases there's been neither contact nor communication (from your side, from my side, it doesn't matter) to the point where I wouldn't know where or how to get in touch with you again even if I wanted to. In other cases Life, being what it is, has dealt us differing hands of cards over the years ensuring our time is filled with conflicting interests. We may never meet again. And then again, we may.

But all that belies this simple truth: when I am alone, when I'm by my Self, I notice the love I had for you before is still in place now. Just as intense. Just as thrilling. Just as sublime. It's never left. Which means you've never left - at least not in my experience. I've never gotten over you. And I don't want to get over you. Ever. In a heartbeat (literally!) I can get back in touch with the love we shared so it's once again and always a living presence for me right here right now no matter how long ago it was, no matter where you are now, no matter what the condition of or even total absence of our communication is now. If I don't love you now when we're no longer together, then I never loved you then when we were together.

And I did love you then. And I do love you now.

Being complete with you, recreating the love I had for you before, even being related to you as I was before (and here I'm referring to intentionally re‑generating the experience of relationship and love I had with you before) may not call for contacting you again - and it may. Sometimes it's not appropriate for me to contact you again. I'm not naïve. Some episodes with you weren't my shining moments, not my favorite scenes in the autobiograhical movie. To tell you the truth, I hate watching these scenes. Sometimes I turn my face away. But they're real. They happened.

If I hurt you, I've explicitly apologized. Explicitly apologizing to you has been, for me, crucial to completing the past and moving on. When it's complete, apologizing doesn't impose or expect anything. Not even renewed contact. Yet not renewing contact doesn't imply I'll not renew the love - that is, my own experience of the love I had with you. It's a re‑generation really, rather than a renewal because this experience of loving you never went away.

I'm a human being ... hello? Aspects of me are brilliant. And if (no, "when") I've been a jerk, I've said so. As we all know in retrospect (and retrospect is always 20/20 vision), being a jerk in love can carry a terrible cost. I've moved on. But neither being a jerk nor paying the price for being a jerk extinguishes the love which kindled our relationship in the first place. Like I said, if I don't love you now that we're no longer together, then I never loved you then when we were together.

And I did love you then. And I do love you now.

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