[. Love .]

What is Love? This is one of the questions I remember a former York University student asked frequently but certainly not easy to answer or comprehend.

My hunny and I spent some quiet quality time together this weekend in the midst of Valentine's Day, Chinese New Year & Family Day. We both tried looking for a gift for each other but in the end we were both empty handed. (I guess candies didn't quite count though they are sweet and yummy!) Sheepishly we told each other the truth. It is funny how things work some times. We continued our day with cooking instant noodles & pan frying turnip cakes, browsing on the internet, and spending time with family & friends.

I found that out of the entire day, the best moment was our little chats, listening to and singing along to his cd compilation of love songs. and simply being next to each other. I think that love is shown in many ways and there's no definition that can fully explain what it is. To this date I still think that 1 Corinthians 13: 4-8 provides the best explanation of how love is shown.

"⁴Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. ⁸Love never fails."

Here is an example from Grey's Anatomy taken from the episode about Valentine's Day. Meredith and Derek are a married couple who works together at a hospital. They are both surgeons and recently Derek was promoted to be the chief of the hospital. Derek, with his new identity and position, is quickly thrown into the responsibilities of a chief which includes decreased time working with patients and increased time responding to public events.

In this episode, Meredith was asked to attend a public event with her husband Derek . She finds herself torn between attending to a patient in need of help and attending a public event in which she has no ties to except that she is Dr. Shepherd's wife. After some reflection she made the choice to support her husband and request for another surgeon to take over her work.

If you don't watch Grey's Anatomy, you may not know how difficult this decision was for Meredith. It is almost out of character for her as one of the top and most ambitious surgeons to not put her career first. Not until she fell in love and married Derek. She now has to confront her new identity as Mrs. Shepherd apart from her prior identity as Dr. Grey. Hopefully the below conversation will illustrate this - this is after attending the public event.

Meredith: Mrs. Shepherd?
Derek: I know.
Meredith: Mrs. Shepherd?
Derek: I know.
Meredith: I don't do brunches, I don't miss surgery, and I don't do Valentine's Day. You're gonna have to make this up to me with a lot of sex.
Derek: Yes, dear.

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Grey's Anatomy Opening Quote:
The surgical scalpel is made of steel, sterilized, carbonized stainless steel. This is a vast improvement over the first scalpel which was pretty much a sharp stick. Medicine is constantly reinventing itself. That means surgeons have to keep reinventing themselves, too. There is constant pressure to adapt to changes. It can be a painful process. But without it, you'll find yourself moving backwards instead of forwards.

Grey's Anatomy Ending Quote:
We have to keep reinventing ourselves, almost every minute because the world can change in an instant. And there's no time for looking back. Sometimes the changes are forced on us. Somtimes they happen by accident and we make the most of them. We have to constantly come up with new ways to fix ourselves. So we change, we adapt. We create new versions of ourselves. We just need to be sure that this one is an improvement over the last.