Love in the Afternoon

I'm posting this story that I wrote back in the first week of launching my blog. It's one of my favorites with a flavor of inspiration. I didn't have many readers at the time, so I'm sharing it again...

Ah, love in the afternoon...and I'm not talking about the 1957 movie set in Paris with Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper. I'm also not talking about the passionate and starry-eyed kind of love between two people. I'm talking about the pure and simple love of life. My sentiment is that our English language genuinely could use at least 150 more words for the countless definitions around the word love. For instance, there's the obvious lovers love, but there's also a love for one's family, or love for a pet or love for the gorgeous sunny weather today. I wonder why our English language is so limited around the nearly endless meanings related to that precious and overused word? We experience love in so many ways, and on so many different levels. Do you ever notice that those who genuinely embrace and love life, that life genuinely embraces and loves them back? In fact that very thought is epitomized in a very interesting French film I saw recently, titled Paris Ja T'aime. The movie tells several different stories about the various forms of love, such as between a mother and her son, or two ex lovers, or between friends. But I found the most memorable story in the movie was about a single American woman who vacationed alone in Paris. Her first experiences were that of loneliness, where everywhere she went, all she saw were people in love. She wished that she could share her all of new experiences with her own lover as well. One afternoon while she was sitting alone on a bench in a lovely Parisian park, she had a very significant epiphany. She was enjoying and admiring all of the sights and sounds of the activities and people around her. In that moment, she realized that in all of her loneliness, she had been ignorant and missed a very crucial and obvious love that had been there all along; that she had fallen in love with Paris, ...and Paris had fallen in love with her.