LOVE: LOVE IS DIFFICULT

Love is difficult. For one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult task of all, the epitome, the ultimate test. It that striving for which all other striving is merely preparation. For that reason young people---who are beginners in everything---cannot yet love, they do not know how to love. They must learn it. With their whole being, with all strenght enveloping their lonely, disquieted heart, they must learn to love--- even while their heartbeat is quickening. Love does not at first have anything to do with arousal, surrender, and uniting with another being---for what union can be built upon uncertainty, immaturity, and lack of coherence? Love is a high inducement for individuals to ripen, to strive to mature in the inner self, to manifest maturity in the outer world, to become that manifestation for the sake of another. This is a great, demanding task; it calls one to expand one's horizon greatly. Only in this sense, as the task to work on themselves, day and night, and to listen, ought young people use the love granted to them. Opening one's self and surrendering, and every kind of communion are not for them yet; they must for a very very long time gather and harbor experience. It is the final goal, perhaps one which human being as yet hardly ever seek to attain. Young people often err, and that intensely so, in this way, since ti is their nature to be impatient: They throw them. They fragment themselves, just as they are, in all of their disarray and confusion. But what is to follow? What should fate do if this takes root, this heap of half-broken things that they call togetherness and that they would like to call their happiness. Questions of love are personal, intimate questions, from love one person to another, that in every case require a new, a special, and an exclusively personal answer. But then, having set no boundaries between each other, and being no longer able to differentiate, they let go