Well, the earth has completed almost one more revolution of its orbit, and here we are again looking into the menacing eyes of giant teddy bears and gagging from the overbearing smells of new colognes and roses. Valentine’s Day is almost here, and there are a few circumstances you could currently be in to affect your mood towards the PDA-fest that’s about to go down.
Some of us have already issued a weather forecast of high angst and rising wine levels for the night of the 14th, and some of us are giddy in adoration of a significant other, ready to lavish them with our feelings on this special day. Whether you are heartbroken, ecstatic, apathetic, or completely dreading this Valentine’s Day, there are still so many things in front of you that you should want to fall in love with.
Your heart deserves the experience every single day to be in love with something and to feel the sensation of being caught on fire. It is what it is meant for. And there is more out there than another human being that can, and is ready, to give it that fullness. So this burnt-out holiday, open your heart and go out on a limb to become infatuated with something bigger than the boy in your class with the razor-sharp jawline. Here are seven better things to fall in love this Valentine’s Day.
1. The Sky at 3 a.m.
One night I was walking home from the library at 3 a.m. It was still early fall then, and the night was warm and welcoming. I remember that I was in the parking lot of my apartment, rubbing my eyes and probably letting out a few strings of curse words regarding my second almost-all-nighter of the week, and the streetlight flickered off. I remember instinctively looking up to see what happened to the light, and the blackness of the sky around me sucked me into its enormity. The stars seemed so white against their overbearing backdrop, and the world around me turned into a kitchen strainer with the heavens pouring through.
Maybe it was because I was strung out on energy drinks, but I had never felt the presence of the universe so closely to me before that point, and I felt like I was only a few inches tall. I laid down on the pavement and smiled as I remembered that the beams of light I was looking at were the same ones over the Mediterranean Sea, Hong Kong, the Nile River, Istanbul and the Amazon Rainforest. That they were trillions of times larger and more powerful than I would ever be, and it was reassuring to remember that nothing I did really mattered — either that or it mattered a whole lot because even though I was small I was here. I found significance in my insignificance because of the sky at 3 a.m. When it’s that early in the morning, it’s only you and absolutely all of everything else.
The silence screams at you and the solitude of trillions of little specks of light watching you wraps you in itself. It will eat you alive if you let it and perhaps that is the most beautiful thing you could do for yourself. So take a walk down your street when the rest of the world is silent, and open your ears for the sonars of the stars. Their siren songs will draw you into a love that will make you feel so humongous through your own shrinkage.
2. Being Afraid
It’s that feeling when you are literally so lost that you’ve never been more uncomfortable or terrified in your life. That moment when you get on a train, and you’ve never been on public transit before because you’re from a small town, and all the signs are in a different language and you just have to come to terms with the fact that you’re either going to end up where you want to go, or somewhere further away where you’re even more unsure of another’s territory. And for your sake, I hope it ends up the latter. Being afraid and being vulnerable is one of the single-most challenging things to try to make yourself comfortable with, but once you fall in love with fear, you realize there is nothing left to really be afraid of, and that behind what we fear is an entire spectrum of life that we hide from ourselves.
Treks, feelings, and lovers fall behind curtains that we set up to hide ourselves. When that bus breaks down on some hundred-mile road in Kenya, or you board that flight where you’re the only one that doesn’t speak Chinese, you embrace the fear of not knowing and learn to let your uncertainty guide you.
Loving fear leads to the grandest of adventures, and once it’s accepted, fear is one of the most calming sensations in the world. It keeps you remembering that you’re doing something a lot of other people never will, and that every trait you embody has readied you for figuring whatever needs to be figured out, out. Fear allows you to realize your full capabilities and go further than you ever would have where your feet had already felt the ground.
3. Air that Smells like Home
Whenever I am waiting for my train from Johannesburg to Pretoria, I always make sure to set all my luggage down and relax my shoulders from my 18-hour trip, steady my heart, and take an obnoxiously deep breath. I let the air that smells like home fill my entire being and I revel in its comfort and me knowing that after all this time, South Africa is still where my heart dwells.
For you it may be the red roof on that abandoned church in the town you grew up in, or the one cracked piece of marble on the floor of the museum in a city you’ve come to know. It may be the warm embrace of your mother and grandmother in Uruguay after years of not seeing them, or simply the air on the balcony of your apartment you share chords of an old guitar with the birds and your best friends. The air that reminds you that you belong somewhere, that this is the air that helped you to take your first breaths of who you are and everything you want to be.
So stick your head out the window, open up all the doors in your house, go on a drive or walk and breathe as deeply as you are able. And fall in love with that air that you could recognize as yours from millions of miles away; the breath that adopted you in your youth and lent itself to you so that you could breathe and feel at home in any new place you go. Fall in love with coming home and the air that reminds you where that is.
4. Manifestations of Beauty
Beauty is such an overused word, and I think that often we forget what beauty is actually supposed to mean. Beauty is not the Victoria’s Secret angel, or the circumference of your thigh, or any of the ways that you can braid your hair after watching a YouTube video.
Beauty signifies something greater; beauty is something that you feel and can acknowledge as something more than you will ever be able to attain. Beauty is the universe’s highest form of appreciation, it is where you feel something just by viewing it; just by knowing it in that very second. It elicits a feeling that you will hold with you for thousands of years after and that you wonder if you knew a thousand prior. We have manifestations of beauty all around us at any time, and they are practically begging for us to fall in love with them, and so often we don’t see what we should and we miss out on something bigger than just something aesthetically pleasing.
The way that a bud of a flower grows out of its node after it has been cut a week earlier; the act at all of cutting off the dead parts of a plant in propagation in order for a new version of that plant to grow anew and on its own; a second chance at developing in a way that makes it feel accomplished. The song of a bird in the morning that watches you every morning to make sure you wake. It takes every ounce of energy from its breakfast to blare what it takes so much pride in. Even if you tell it to shut up, it’s still going to sing its melody before the sun rises, just so you won’t be late for school. The way that water can shape rocks, the wrinkles of a sage on your grandfather’s face, the way that the sun loves you enough to kiss you in the summertime, and the way the snow acknowledges your warmth and melts in your presence. It’s everywhere and it’s ready to show you the love that you desire, it all has loved you for a thousand years now.
5. Drunk-ordering pizza
If you’re anything like my best friend and I, pizza in the early hours of the morning is not a question of necessity or interest of our well-beings, but more so whether the crust will be ranch or garlic flavored.
A bond of a best friend is something special and something worth letting yourself fall in love with. I’m not talking about falling in love-love, unless you have a hankering for making things harder for yourself, I’m talking about genuine, thankful, appreciative love for a person that chooses to be with you and probably would take the pain away from you, no matter how shitty of a thing you did to deserve the beating. This past semester I’ve most likely slept in my best friend’s bed almost as much as mine, and when I am in mine she is too. She comes over after she’s been out and I wake up and we talk for an hour at 2 a.m. We are disgusting and intolerable around each other and love every second of it. We know how other best friends have screwed each other over in our pasts, and we love that person enough to promise to stay their friend only because we love knowing who they are and having their companionship through every drunken text to an ex or life crisis after failing a calculus exam.
Friendships like these that actually last come very rarely, and it is our job to push ourselves to open to this one of a kind love while it is in front of us. Because this person and this love that is in front of us now will not only stay in front of us, but will also walk beside us when we take up other loves in our lives, and even behind us when we need space to grow on our own. So go grab yourself matching BFF bracelets and a Hungry Howie’s coupon, because you’ve got some life-long love to flourish.
6. The Way the World is Changing
It’s easy to see the world as a scary and disturbing place, it most definitely is and gets more that way every day. However, the world is also becoming more progressive and accepting every day, and that is something to fall in love with. When you see 60-year-old women fighting for legalization of gay marriage on Facebook, or 30-year-old men reading books about women in the workforce; white men writing letters to police chiefs about mistreatment towards people of color, you can smile and know that the heart of the world is growing at least a little bit with every inch that it’s being shot with a million arrows of hatred.
7. Your Own Magnificence
You’ve heard it a hundred times before, inside every girls magazine and on every skin care commercial — you are beautiful! Love yourself! Love who you are! Which, are all very important sentiments, but do we ever look deeper into why we should be doing these things? Do we ever look into what exactly makes us so incredibly worthy of that love or what is so imperative about our individual designs that we need to acknowledge in order to thrive?
Inside of you, you have a mind that thinks about impressively tortuous and excruciatingly beautiful things every single day. You have so much empathy for the world around you that things pain you that you don’t even physically have to feel. You have limbs that you’ve been blessed enough to keep and when conditioned, they can support you in almost any environment. You have ideas that are specially crafted by the firing of unique sets of synapses that are only available to you. You scream when you are in love and whisper when you feel small. Your voice will be etched into the trunks of trees forever and children will read your rings in years to come and they will tell of how long your words were of importance on this planet.
You are unimaginably complex, incomparably your own and intensely unpredictable — and the absolute best thing you can do for yourself this Valentine’s Day is buy a single rose from the guy at the booth beside the road and toast with yourself to a new year of falling in love with the magnificence that is you.
