I’ve had the notion of capacity for love on my mind lately. I know I’m a verbally effusive person: I share my feelings easily and without reservation. I remember as a child always wanting my parents’ last words to me (and vice versa) whenever we said goodbye to be “I love you.” This was “in case I never see you again.” How desperately macabre that seems now, coming from a 7 year old. Nevertheless, that was what I wanted. Someone recently told me that I have a lot of love in me, which I think is indisputably true. But the person’s tone there wasn’t entirely positive, and I’ve been thinking about that. Does having a lot of love somehow lessen the love one feels for a single person? Does the fact that the well is deep mean that the water offered is less meaningful? I don’t think so, personally, but I’m grappling with the faint assertion that that may be so by a friend. I’m emotionally open and quite warm but I also know I deeply love only a few people. It is easy to become my friend but hard to get very close. And one thing that surprises people is that I am not that interested in being touched; I’m not wildly physically affectionate.
I re-read Peggy Noonan’s achingly wonderful op-ed on the final messages people left for their loved ones on 9/11. I was looking for affirmation that having a lot of love – and expressing it openly – is a good thing. The key line in her piece is an articulate description of how I choose to go through life:

We’re all lucky to be here today and able to say what deserves saying, and if you say it a lot, it won’t make it common and so unheard, but known and absorbed.