We start trying to be wise when we realise that we are not born knowing how to live, but life is a skill that has to be acquired, like riding a bicycle or playing the piano. But what does wisdom counsel us to do? It tells us to aim for tranquility and inner peace, a life free from anxiety, fear, idolatry, and harmful passions. Wisdom teaches us that our first impulses may not always be true, and that our appetites will lead us astray if we do not train reason to separate vain from genuine needs. It tells us to control our imagination or it will distort reality and turn mountains into molehills and frogs into princesses. It tells us to hold our fears in check, so that we can be afraid of what will harm us, but not waste our energies fleeing shadows on the wall. It tells us we should not fear death, and that all we have to fear is fear itself.

But what does wisdom say about love? Is it something that should be given up completely, like coffee or cigarettes, or is it allowed on occassions, like a glass of wine or a bar of chocolate? Is love directly opposed to everything that wisdom stands for?

The difference could be grouped into categories of mature and immature love. Preferably in almost every way, the philosophy of mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealisation, it is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful, and reciprocated. Immature love on the other hand is a story of chaotic lurching between idealisation and disappointment, an unstable state where feelings of ecstasy and beatitude combine with impressions of drowning and fatal nausea, where the sense that one has finally found the answer comes together with the feeling that one has never been so lost. The logical climax of immature (because absolute) love comes in death, symbolic or real. The climax of mature love comes in marriage, and the attempt to avoid death via routine. For immature love accept no compromise, and once we refuse compromise, we are on the road to some kind of cataclysm.

Alain De Botton - Essays in love

A beautiful book full of wise and profound insights.
It is an irony that i yearn to see you yet i am afraid to meet you. Maybe i am just afraid that the whole story will not end up like how i visualize. Why should i fear if i believe in the possibility. What is it that i believe?

Days have been rather kind to me.

Thank you for the lovely home-cooked meal and inviting me to your place. It have been a while since i had such a simple but heartwarming dinner.