wrestling with a tough metaphor

I was wrestling with a tough metaphor all morning, not the usual stuff, but a morning meditation which got interrupted with the phone, and then the fax machine, and then the phone again, and then a short hike around the lake, and still, I have this unresolved definition. I was looking for a good way to define love as opposed to obsession, and the distinction between the two. Of course I’m obsessed at times. And I watch this in clients all the time. What I’m looking for is way to put this into words, a way to express the subtle nuance of a true emotion, a method for making the distinction between several emotions that frequently look just the same. Now, I can give a text book definition of love, I can fall back on the literature of several centuries and come up with a poetical way to address it, I can leaf through my files and come up with some ways it’s expressed, but I don’t have a handle on yet. I’m obviously not alone — that much is for sure.