Love goals

I had a goal of writing a post about love on each weekday in February.

That would have been 20 posts, had I written them.  I wrote 10.  This one makes 11.  Today is the last weekday in February.  I managed to meet 55% of my goal.  If you figure that 65% is what you have to earn in a class to pass, I failed soundly.

BUT.

This is not school.  I am not taking a class.

Who wants to read twenty posts in succession about love anyway?  Seriously.  Not me!

Besides, I learned other things.  For instance, it is more important to express love than to write about it, and if writing about it prevents you from expressing it, then writing about it is futile . . .  counterproductive, in fact.

This February, we had a medical procedure, a visit from out-of-state kids (and a local kid), a lovely holiday (Valentine's is so fun, and low stress, and pretty), and a birthday this past Wednesday.  It's been a nice month, a month of opportunities to give and receive love.

Another thing.  Love is sort of private.  I'm not talking about "mushy" stuff.  I just mean that I don't feel called to blather on about all the details of love in my family.  The privacy of intimacy is what makes it special.  Isn't that what intimacy means, after all?  Intimacy is private and personal and only shared between people who can trust deeply. 

Love is also a very strong topic.  Like honey, a little goes a long way.  My hope is that the theme of love will always be a strong thread in my writing, but I learned that it is not a good subject to overdose on as a spotlighted subject, day after day.

In the future, I hope to love better in real life and write with more subtlety, more understated suggestion, more delicacy.  Most of us would rather be drawn into a story than smacked in the face with a principle.  ("Show, don't tell," is what they always teach in creative writing classes.  I think it applies outside of writing, as well.)

May we all live, learn, and love more than we loved yesterday.