Everyday Canvas

The Beginning of a Day and Thoughts on Love

Prompt: "As the room gradually lightens like an empty stage before my eyes, I am aware that another day, another play in which I will be responsible for writing the script, developing the main character and managing the props is about to begin." Okay. Writers and friends write about your day and life.

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Another day and I am alive. I wake up and thank God that I am still breathing and it is a nice day out, a bit windy, but I am not picking on the weather, at all. Being alive is good enough. Breathe or not…these are the main consequences of having been born. At this time, I am on the side of breathing as it is the only thing I know and I am grateful for it.

Looking at the bathroom mirror, I can’t help smiling as my eyes take hold of the little paper fastened to the side that says, “We all know mirrors don’t lie, but I am just grateful that they don’t laugh.” I gypped these words from the internet somewhere. They always make me giggle or smirk or smile, and they lighten up another day that I will live through.

Hubby is up before me. I go to the living area and ask him when he wants his coffee. He has his own morning rituals, and his breakfast rituals are much more complicated than mine. I put water in the kettle for tea and coffee. Although we have three fancy drip-coffee-makers, I am using just a funnel-like little tool, which makes my routine easier since he’s the only one who has coffee in the mornings. I always drink tea. My need for coffee arrives a little later around lunch time if it ever comes.

The rest of my morning is spent on the chores and a peek or two at the internet. Meanwhile, hubby fills me in about the goings on with the politics, stock market, or whatever juicy action he’s been watching on TV. So much for what’s happening in the world! I am not into television at all. I get those cheap thrills of what’s on the screen through him. Knowledge of the world by proxy. I am economical that way.

A good book is another thing, though, and what I like the most, but what if books instead of the TV screen were the ones to give us those fleeting lowly thrills? The thought makes me shudder.

My failing, when it comes to TV, are the webcams. I love watching the webcams that people have affixed around where life is, like those of wild animals and busy city streets. Just watching those gives me story ideas and I feel I am temporarily there with those beings inside their real lives.

During the last few months, I’ve been watching a bald-eagle cam from Fort Myers. The bald-eagle couple M15 and Harriet (named by the moderators of the site) have an eaglet E9, who is 46 days old today, and she is not anymore that fuzz-ball chick at birth; she is almost as big as M15, her daddy. I think I am getting emotionally attached to this bald-eagle family, but when the baby flies off the nest and the parents, too, fly away, I’ll be all right because the same happened with my babies, and I know and accept that this is the way of the world.

Prompt: Talking about love, what do you think about people who believe the ideas on love that belong to others rather than finding out what love is for themselves and the persons who are always looking for their next love but do not work on trying to love themselves?

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Love seems to be the main goal everyone strives for since birth. In fact, it has been established that newborns, when they are not subjected to human touch, do not do well and most do not even survive.

Love has many different faces and all of them are good and desirable; that is as long as any one kind of love is sincere and hopefully unconditional. It is this unconditional aspect that eradicates the idea of the negative in love. Thus, I have to say any true love is positive, even if it may have its ups and downs.

Of all the different forms and faces of love, self-love is the foundation of a person’s most important relationship. Loving oneself has to do with the awe annd respect of one’s own being and accepting that being as is. It is not, however, being arrogant or comparing oneself to others or always getting one’s way at the expense of others.

Self-love begins when we look at ourselves with searching eyes and discovering all the nooks and crannies that our characters and personalities hide, and then, accepting what we find out and, if we can, fixing what is lacking.

Self-love suffers when someone else projects their negative feelings toward an impressionable person, mostly a young person who hasn’t gotten to know herself or himself fully, yet. When one’s self-worth is questioned, self-love can turn into self-hate and that is not a healthy way to live or offer oneself for the betterment of the world.

Self-love enables a person to make better choices and allows him or her to rejoice in others’ fortunes and feel a genuine love toward all people. For this reason, self-love is an obligation for and a prerequisite to loving others.