[Ilya]

Originally Posted by wolfgang

Time, ok. And it's better to have loved and lost because you know you can love. But to have ot taken and not here hurts.

I think that's where we start to disagree. In my reality the love is never gone. I still love each and every person I was ever in love with. We might not date anymore, we might not see each other or talk to each other for years. But the love is still here. So, no pain is necessary for me. The same for death. Some of the people in my life are dead now. However I'm not sad about it. I was for the relatively short period of time. I've mourned. I've accepted their death. But still I have the love for them. It is alive in my heart. And the memories of them are the source of joy for me.

Is it better to hurt for a love that's gone, then to not have loved?

I say yes. It is better to go blind than to never see the sunrise. It is better to become confined to a wheelchair than to never ever run through the morning meadow.

I guess if the hurt feelings resolve or lessen and the love that was can be remember for being a cool thing in the past - then it's better. But first one has to go through those feelings of not having love that felt great in the past.

Yes, it is true, mourning first, warm memories later. But some people are somehow stuck in the mourning stage and let the fact of loss to poison their lives ever after. I don't think it is a healthy approach.

Clearly putting something in the past also is a trigger for sadness. To actually stop denying the love is gone is sad. So maybe to feel the hurt over lost love is also an expression of putting the memory in the past - an acknowledgement of framing the memory.

I think it is, for me such event was always the trigger for sadness, mourning in extreme cases. Otherwise I would be schizophrenic.

hmmm... The positive should outshine the negative. The negative is that the positive is no longer here. The positive is in the past but negative only because the positive is gone. It's a positive memory with a negative in the now, since it's gone.

The fact that something is not in the present is not sad by itself. Otherwise I would have nearly 28 years of sadness under my belt. Present is a pretty small period of time, isn't it? It is a brief moment squeezed between the huge past and the eternal future. And the more we concentrate on the present, the smaller it gets.

But we have a choice how to perceive the events in the past. What to recall and what to forget. I prefer to remember the happy moments, and if there are the negative ones, I try to give them a positive spin. Even if it is just calling such moment a lesson.