From time to time I remind myself of this blog and feel guilty for not writing more in it; the truth is that, between a busy and fun start of the year which continued through summer and doing most of my writing on Twitter, I haven’t had much to write to the world about.

But now I’m back in the UK and, as usual, I’m in that mushy feeling state of mind. My whole view of living in the UK for the better part of the year tended to oscillate between “I’m not really living anything behind so let’s go go go!” to “Is it really worth leaving?” over the years, mostly being in tight connection to whether I had a special someone and if she was coming with me or not.

As you can guess, now I’m in the latter of the two mind sets, which makes this post have some sort of context that was missing before.

Love = worn out shoesLove is that pair of sneakers you just can’t part with; you’ve been through everything in them, shared the ground beneath your world at every step and even though they may now look old and battered and broken they’re an part of who you are. They represent you, they’ve “grown” with you and every dent, tear and spot represents a shared memory, a shared act.

Yes, I can also see that Romanian saying “a fi calcat in picioare” (“to be stepped on”) forming in your head after the whole shoe analogy and you know what, it’s a valid thought! Love always represents a gamble, you’re always taking a risk when you allow yourself to say those three words that can make or break a moment or more, but in the end it’s a risk that’s worth taking; sure, you can end up being used and abused and stepped on, but hey, it’s a learning experience, right? It’s a risk that needs taking towards being happy. Sure, there are people who are happy and content without love, but I’m not one of them.

Cory Doctorow asks an interesting question in Eastern Standard Tribe: “Would you rather be smart, or happy?” this being closely tied to one of the themes of the book which is betrayal: the main character, Art, is used and manipulated by his girlfriend for her own gain. Art is generally a smart person, but he lets his guard down when love gets in the way which ends with him locked up in an insane asylum (no, that’s not the end of the book, I won’t spoil it for you) – happiness, even though fleeting and maybe fake, leads to his almost destruction.

I think that this, smart versus happy, like almost everything in life is a balancing act; you’re high on your wire, the lights on you and the crowd holding their breath while you make your way across, well, life, trying not to fall – keep everything in balance and you’re good, healthy and possibly more successful, don’t and you fall to your doom (sorry, life rarely has safety nets).

You might think that everything I’ve written so far is a cliché, but you know what?

The biggest truths aren’t original. The truth is ketchup. It’s Jim Belushi. Its job isn’t to blow our minds. It’s to be within reach.                                                                                       - Jeff Winger

In the end though, every time I think about love I fall back to a thing I once read (and for the life and deep regret of me I can’t remember where):

Being in love, truly in love, means renouncing all possible lives except the one shared with the person you love.