After a pause, she looked at both of them and said, "But let not the worldly-wise attempt this, because love is a loser's bargain when measured in the scales of gain or loss. If you are obsessed with your input-output percentages, keep as far away as possible from this madness -- as the worldly-wise generally do."
As she was speaking, her eyes rolled across to the meadow and settled on a cow blissfully licking the nape of her playful and protesting calf. "Input and output, give and take - this is the language of the fish-market, or at best of relationships," she paused as the calf walked to her and stood between her and her guests. She caressed its velvety white crop above its upper lip as it closed its eyes in a gesture of pure trust. "Love is not the language of those who crave for the joys of being loved -- for the joys of love are the joys of loving, and the joys of loving are the joys of giving. There'll be times when you may confuse love with your need to belong to somenone -- or, more appropriately -- to get someone to belong to you. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this desire to possess.in exchange for maintaining a show of being possessed , except that it is just that: a desire to own and possess with a self-deceiving pretense of being possessed. This is a barter. But even in this barter, you might want to see the scales tilted towards you. You will often find yourself spending long hours behind closed doors calculating your inputs into relations, often adversely comparing it with the output. But love has nothing to offer to a calculating mind, for a mind that calculates does so to count its gains. Rarely, if ever, does it consider what it receives. Only those unmindful of loss or gain can truly experience the joys of love. Love, then, - and only then -is God - giving without expectation, freed of the self-gratifying indulgence in pain. Giving not with a doleful voice or a tear in the eye -- imagining oneself to be a sacrificial giver. But giving for the delight of it. There is joy in there, and no self-appeasing pain in seeing oneself as a victim can then disfigure your spirit. A lover is nothing if not a giver and in giving he delights. And if this appears to be 'indiscreet' or 'impractical or bookish or even insane', let this voice of a sage speak to your heart", and she took out a book from her bag and started reading slowly, "The cool, calculating people, careful of appearances, will never fall grievously low, but they will never soar high. Only the deeply sincere can afford to make fools of themselves."
