Love

I have a friend in Vietnam, Jen Vuhuong who writes lots of text online about life coaching – I edit her English, correcting mistakes and making her message clearer. She holds classes and organises meetings in Vietnam. Now, I am rather sceptical about life classes, much of it amounts to common sense, or things that one learns anyway in the course of one’s life. Major religions also “give” life classes. Buddhism is the main religion in Vietnam, and that contains many lessons for life.

But one word she uses a lot is “love”. And I corrected her once and said that “love” as a noun doesn’t mean very much. Ha, my arrogance! It is used frequently in the Bible as a noun, but I still feel that it is empty without an object of that love, or when it becomes a verb. When you think about it, how would you define “love” in its noun form? I would have great difficulty in doing that. A generosity of sprit maybe, an extrovert personality?

I remember, many years ago, there was a movie on TV (black and white in those days). The hero entered the cave-like lair of the villain who wanted to destroy the world (or something like that). There was a computer in the cave with a gentle electronic humming sound and our hero came to the conclusion that, if he could destroy the computer, he could overcome the villain. But there was no way in, there was just a blank grey panel. But then he saw a keyboard and wrote, “What is love?” (no voice recognition in those days). The humming started to increase in volume and pitch. After a while, smoke appeared, coming from a vent high up on the side of the panel. (Let us imagine that this computer was an early model made up of thousands of valves). Then, flames started to emanate and the doors to the lair which had been held shut, suddenly were released. And our hero entered! Some of the details of this story are a bit hazy – it was a long time ago. But it was fun to tell it as new… in 2024!