Today I was listening to a song by Deana Carter “What Makes You Stay”,
co-incidentally a friend then asked for advice about staying. I’m not qualified to give advice, hell most of
the time the professionals we go to can only tell us what they feel the best
course of action would be but they can never be 100% sure either since they
only have your view of events. We all know our own experiences are not always
exactly how things are, perception and emotion skews everything in the human
mind.
Regardless, I began thinking “What Makes You Stay”, love is both
horribly complicated and simple at the same time. Sometimes, we are left with
the what-if feeling regardless of what action or choice we make when we come to
a crossroads, other times months or even years down the line we know there was no better choice we could have made and we are even grateful for the choice we made.
Often asking the question why do we stay is as unanswerable as why do
we love. Listing the attributes about these two feeling whether inter-related or
not are just things about the person that reinforces the feelings that we
already feel. For a parent to answer the question, why do we love our children
is a much easier question to answer because this being is irrevocably a part of
us, someone we helped create, mould, simply because there they were completely
helpless and in need, because we see aspects of ourselves within them. These are
things they learn from us, most are not born into these people, it is a life we
are part of in ways we could never really be a part of in our partners.
The love we have for another grown person, that has nothing to do with
us, who are entirely nothing like us is a love that grows for many reasons that
we cannot explain. We often love people who don’t deserve the depth of feeling we feel for them, we love people who constantly hurt us and who we not only choose to
forgive but accept whole-heartedly back into our lives. We also consciously hurt
those we love, for whatever reason we have, often knowing what we do isn’t right
but in those moments we either do it because we feel justified or because we
feel we’ll make sure they never find out. Forgetting that simply by committing
the act with the full knowledge of the pain the actions will cause places blame
of the injustice squarely on our shoulders, regardless of whether they discover
it or not, we are aware.
So the simple answer to why do we stay can then only be love. Love is
what keeps us, regardless of our various other reasons, this is the true
unexplainable root to every question, “ What Makes You Stay”, it’s not because
of who they are, the way they treat you either occasionally or all the time, its not either because of the future person you “know” they will become. It has absolutely
nothing to do with who the person really is, but everything to do with you.
What you feel. The feeling in every moment whether it is bliss or pain is what
truly keeps you rooted where you are. It is even that feeling of longing based
in that love when you are not together that keeps you going back even when you
know you should not.
When we realise that the answer to “What Makes You Stay”, is love, what
then? Love can kill us in ways that is more of a “death” than actual death. When
the body dies, it no longer feels but when the love within us slowly destroys fundamental
parts of what we actually are,
that is a worse kind of death as we are reminded
everyday what we once were. Yet love also makes us soar, opens something within
us like nothing else in the known universe can. More songs, poetry and stories have
been written about love gained and love lost than anything else. Yet nothing
answers the question all of us has asked ourselves “What Makes Us Stay”,
because if we were to put every wrong, hurtful thing someone has done to us on
a scale on one side and on the other side we had to put love, what would the
honest result in our minds be? That love for us would either balance out our
scale or tip it in the favour of love. It takes a very strong person to realise
that regardless of how much we love someone it does not justify the hurt.
So What Makes You Stay, the simple answer, your heart and what do we do
about that? The only honest answer anyone can give...I don’t know. None of us
do. The best thing we can do is our best, muddle though it and find out what
makes us whole at the end of it all. Not for anyone but for us.
