To begin, I think that at it's core Valentine's Day is supposed to be a day where we feel thankful and appreciative of someone special in our life who makes us feel less alone and brings us some degree of happiness be it little or profound. Of course, like many holidays the purpose and message of the holiday is so perverted by the world around us that it would not be a stretch to think that the day has been morphed fundamentally from its original intention. Nowadays it could be argued that Valentine's Day is a cheap excuse to buy candy and flowers in an attempt to save face with someone you care about. It's kind of a double standard wherein even if you genuinely care about someone, you are essentially forced to re-emphasize that bond for the sake of keeping up appearances. I find myself of a more optimistic mindset when it comes to this most fluffy of holidays. Instead of basking in cynicism, it would benefit everyone to embrace what the core of February 14th is all about. We should all be lucky enough to appreciate the day and analyze the people around us who care enough to enrich our lives in some way or another. Surely the stigmas surrounding any largely industrialized holiday remain intact, but perception is key to any event in life. A day is what we make it, and Valentine's is no exception assuming you are not jaded enough to notice.
This all brings me to the very subject, or at least the intent of, the holiday: love. Love is a complex and layered word that can mean a plethora of things. Love can signify anything from a deep and sincere caring about another person, to one of the most profound and driving forces any one human being can encounter in their natural lives. Love is an emotion and an entity that can at once move humans to acts of great compassion to acts of unbelievable greed all in the name of something that completes everyone on a very primal level. Love is a force of nature, and by simply being such a thing defies the constraints of logic and rationality. Love can make us say and do things we never thought possible both good and bad. As much as we all would like to rationalize and confine how and why we love; no one's judgment is free of the wonderful and terribly powerful influence that brings us all to act uncouth.
It is upon this sentiment that I wish everyone who reads this to appreciate whatever it is in your life today worthy of your love. If you are lucky enough to have someone special in your life who would go above and beyond the regular call of human connections to make you feel better than yourself, embrace it and champion it. Love as a force of nature is by definition unpredictable. No one among us can know its path, and sometimes in the grand ebb and flow of time all we have is but a moment together. Valentine's Day is about seizing that proverbial moment and punctuating it with a statement that in this specific moment, someone meant something to you that transcended the everyday and made you feel as close to whole as humanity is meant to feel. These sentiments can be felt in many complex and multifaceted ways both moving and imperceptible. The point of it all is that Valentine's celebrates the overwhelming and civilization altering powers of love and the profundity of these forces we can't control and which without we could not survive.
Happy Valentine's Day everyone, and may your moment today be one for the ages that reminds you why the other 364 days in a year are worth doing together.
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