Life has a confounding way of determining the course of your days and nights. It can build you up, step by step, to a crescendo of emotional fury so torrential it must be outside the laws of nature and of love. It is a feeling so intense that you do not pause to reflect on whether others have felt something similar, or whether they can relate. Then, the seasons of life changes.
The weather you once knew to be so certain and unyielding has not only stormed, but clouded the most defined traces of that refined moment you once occupied. Life brought you to a feeling as high as the stars, only to drop you back low enough, to recall why stars captured imagination in the first place: because they light up the night.
Life rarely allows for what was in between to remain static and concrete. Rather, it allows the gift of filling a void with your own perspective. As such, life empowers you to be sentimental.
You could hardly credit yourself more than the bearer of your truest joy, or the survivor of your deepest pain. To indulge in sentimentality is to both live within those glorious past moments, but also to be free of the terrors they can bring. Your deepest pain, when cast back in the mind from years down the road, may be seen as what it perhaps always was: a necessary tribulation for you to become the better you of today.
Your greatest, fiery love, when framed through the lens of sentimentality, will no longer be suffocating in the breadth of its accompanied loss, but rather a golden, pristine moment of when you, against the odds and the portents, were the source of light and happiness.
Sentimentality is not confined to the burning passions of lost and possibly rediscovered romantic love. Your love is not bound by life to serve only the passions of your body. Life rewards those who nurture love in the mind, in the community, in the family, and in the soul. These loves can inspire an equally sentimental urge, of which any of you who have lost a loved one readily know.
Of all the loves we hold during life, it is those outside of romance which most shape the constellation of self, the heavenly map of what makes you, definitively you. You must decide whether you will bask in fullness, or dwindle in lonely voids. And, if it is to be the former, and if you are to be flowering with life, then you must let yourself remember what you have seen, where you have been, and whom you have loved.
It is the greatest gift they can leave you, and one of the most mightiest you can allow yourself to receive. The glory days are there, waiting for you to recall.
The journey continues right here and everywhere.
Last Updated: July 8, 2021
