I’ve always felt that the important encounters in one’s life are, in a sense, reunions.

I am here speaking of love but, then again, love has so many layers that one has to constantly mention to which of them they’re referring. Because on the one hand there’s the love that grows, that shows itself through action and develops as two people share their lives (this is the reference layer of M. Scott Peck’s affirmation, “love is a not a feeling,” the validity of which I couldn’t accept otherwise). In this sense, love is something that is built, that often requires work and effort. In this sense, a meeting is a starting point, the potential birth of something new.

And then there’s the love that goes way beyond action, relationship, will, space, time; that comes from a much deeper layer of one’s being, that is always there and has always been there. In this particular sense, a meeting is a reunion and a recognition, while falling in love is, among other things, a discovery of the love that was already there. Sometimes it very much feels as if the encounter was preplanned by some cosmic intelligence. (The term “preplanned” is laden with all sorts of unfortunate, pop-spirituality connotations, but, for lack of a better description, it’s as if a clock was unwound and went off at a precise time and certain things get activated – not sooner, not later.)

This is yet another reason why I very much believe that if one loves, they love forever, regardless of what happens with the relationship (romantic or otherwise), even when there’s no relationship anymore (nor the desire to continue or return to it). As far as I’m concerned, the love never goes away: it can be latent, one can even repress it or try to deny it, but it’s always there.

In many ways, I experienced the major events and major encounters in my life as reunions. As surreal reunions, for that matter, whether I recognized them as such instantaneously or realized it sometime later, in retrospect, with an unshakable feeling that it couldn’t have been otherwise.

This surreal character of these moments and meetings mainly has to do with the realization that you are driven by forces and motivations beyond your conscious control and awareness. These forces come from the very depths of your being, so they couldn’t be closer or more intimate to you – and at the same time they feel completely strange. It’s this staggering, impossible contradiction: something that couldn’t be more familiar and intimate is felt as almost alien. It’s the realization that these forces, motivations, feelings and so on have been there all along, that who you thought you were is not who you thought you were or, rather, you had a very incomplete picture. It’s both frightening and wonderful, both deeply reassuring (because it’s a homecoming to something very fundamental within you and, potentially, within another) and ridden with uncertainty (because it’s new and risky – you’re basically stepping into uncharted territory). As if you’re tripping between realms, on the very thin line between undeniable certainty and “I must be completely crazy.”

Plenty of times I saw myself needing to postpone stuff I had planned for a certain day (as is the case tonight) because I was simply overwhelmed and blown away by such ginormous inner events and realizations, that were now reaching my conscious awareness in a way which was both steady and firmly rooted (given that they had been there for a very long time, if not for eons, albeit way deep below the surface), as well as explosive (since they were only now erupting in my conscious awareness.) If anything, it felt physically impossible to do anything else but witness and process the inner events, in the same way that a trip leaves almost zero space for other things as it seizes you in a state which is simultaneously one of profound relaxation and homecoming and a gripping, hypnotizing focus on your inner world, that is now projected onto or merged with the entire reality. The enormity of what was being unpacked within me often left my body trembling with the intensity.

Just to make a point clear: many psychological and healing approaches seem very keen on reducing the human being to a mental-biological mechanism or, at least, they read everything through this lens, thus committing the crime of eliminating the ineffable and the unknown from the equation. Terms such as “pattern,” “trauma,” “insecure attachment” have flooded social media over the last few years. That many people have traumatic patterns and form unhealthy relationships due to such unconscious motivations is something I would never contest. And I am certainly of the opinion that the healing and self-knowledge process includes the identification of and confrontation with one’s trauma, traumatic patterns and so forth. According to the discourses I’ve just mentioned, the hit that one feels when meeting a potential new partner, for instance, and the ensuing emotional rollercoaster, is nothing but the perfect match between traumatic patterns and the accompanying chemical cocktail – it’s not love, it’s trauma.

Forget about all that for a moment. Such things do happen, but I’m speaking of something else when I say “forces and motivations beyond your conscious control and awareness.” Life is much more complex and mysterious. This something-elseness cannot be explained by neither psychology nor biology (themselves mysterious and miraculous, actually.)

Long live the something-elseness.