Love really is a gamble. You are pledging your whole life to someone who will inevitably change. And if they don’t change, chances are you will. Soooo you are pledging to love all the future iterations of a person. And hoping that all of the future iterations of yourself will love that new person. While still learning yourself while you’re changing. It’s enough to make your head spin. Every facet of human existence is in a constant state of change. Every day, you are made anew. At the molecular level, old cells are carried off and new ones grow in their place. Your bone cells regenerate little by little, every day. Continually, this happens. Your skin cells slough off all day. All day. Your hair is continually growing and changing. Why do we think our souls and our spirits are not? Why do we think that we reach this space called GROWN wherein we are stable, rooted, and all our opinions should be firm? I have never had as many life-altering paradigm shifts as I’ve had in my 30s. I don’t think humans should marry before 30. (I don’t think humans should marry at all, but that’s another post). In your 30s you begin to measure what you were taught about the world with what you can infer and reasonably conclude after having been alive for 30 years. And all too often, that shit don’t add up. The milk’s gone bad.

It’s tough, right? You don’t particularly care for black people but you have a black grandbaby. You are pro-life but your 11 year old was raped and is pregnant. Pastor told you gays will inherit death but your macho Marine son just came out and told you he loves men.  Life comes at you fast, right? The discomfort felt between your tradition and this new information is called cognitive dissonance (CD). CD is that space, between what you were taught and the new thing that contradicts what you were taught. Some people let CD hold them in traditional views. It’s too much work for some to push past the mental discomfort. Others accept new views, explore the gray areas and close the CD gaps by creating new schema, a new paradigm.

And so what of love? It’s a challenge, to know and love someone and then be faced with a (sometimes incrementally, sometimes all at once) changing person to love. But what of love? Are we to stay in our tradition, and insist that the person we are with stay the one we fell in love with? Or do we push past our dissonance and challenge ourselves to love a new love?

Vibrate higher.

–Nic