My deep thought for the day: love is like a U2 song.

I’ll try and explain.

The morning started rough. It was not a sure thing that we were going to make a seamless extraction from bed, through the breakfast routine, to the school bus. Not a sure thing at all.

Enter Significant Other, to the rescue, shifting up the shifty-tense-clock-watching energy, with a sudden pronouncement: “I just read that singing actually produces endorphins. Just singing makes you happy. And I also read that once, U2 heard about a gospel choir that was singing one of their songs, so they headed out to sing with them.”

We might have had the details wrong but out plopped an iPad onto the kitchen table and we watched Bono and the boys jamming with the Harlem gospel choir. I watched what happened to those bodies, as they sang. That at first, Bono was just sitting in his chair, but he couldn’t stay seated for long. At first, the gospel choir were sitting still, but they couldn’t stay still for long.

It made me think about love… because loving an almost-eight-year through a series of come-be-with-me, get-away-from-me moments is perplexing and tiring and it makes you wonder about love, if you’re doing it right, if he’s feeling it towards you… and then I realized, oh, it’s just like any other feeling (refer to previous posts about emotional fluency) – it moves, it ripples, it flows. It’s not a pose, a stance, a posture, a fixed state, this love business. It’s alive. And it moves – in us and through us. Sometimes, love can be quiet, we can sit curled up in the corner. Sometimes, it begins to move us in such a way that we have to get to our feet. Sometimes we have to yell and scream and clap. Sometimes it makes us want to run away. Oh, I realized, it’s ALIVE. Oh, I realized, it all belongs.

Oh, I realized, this is a nice song to have in my head all day.

(And yes, we did, in the end, make it to the bus.)