Hello and welcome! Last week I tumbled into love, and this is part two. Since I am following no frame work to organize these thoughts yet I recommend giving last week’s post a read to catch the all too important details.
To sum up the main points, I supposed that love as it is meant to exist does not exist very often. I meandered through a good working definition of love that means to be for someone or something. I also concluded that we cannot sustain love on our own because we do not have enough of it by ourselves. At the same time I concluded that in order to have love it must be shared. Instinctively I know these are both true. Somewhere on the road I learned love is exchanged through relationships, so we do need to give it to have it. I also learned that giving love away without being filled in return will eventually sap someone of their capacity to love. Since this is not a thesis I will not need to go any farther than this, but please feel free interject here. I am looking at this part through a my own lens. Let me know what your lenses tell you. For now I am going on as if these were true.
The paradox between not having enough love and needing to give it away makes sense if trust is considered. If you show your support for someone just to get love back the act loses its meaning. Unconditional love does not exist if the motives are only to fill in your own needs to receive love. At some point the one taking the bait will catch on to this conditional giving. To make love right involves just giving of yourself because you want to. The latter action says, “I care about you.” the former says, “I care about me.” In order to give love well there needs to be trust that you will receive the love you need somewhere. Without trust it is hard to do what it takes to be in a relationship where love can thrive. Sometimes the trust is challenged by hard experiences, but the trust needs to be there in order to be able to give love as well as to be able to receive it.
Trust solves the perceived paradox very well. It also brings the idea of risk taking to mind. You see trusting relationships are not formed quickly. In relationships new or old it can take a while to count someone as trust worthy with parts of your life. There is a great deal of wisdom in being a good steward with your heart, and not giving it all away to something you do not know is safe yet. But at some point there needs to be an initiation of relationship or a risk. I suppose this would be like being an investor. They would throw a little bit of cash on this idea or that idea to see if something happened. This analogy quickly breaks down since the investor is expecting a self gratifying return, but there are some shared aspects with love here. Scatter some love here and some there you will see some take to it and you can give them more. Eventually love comes to roost in this way.
I have definitely concluded one thing about love; it is an enormous topic to explore. There are so many aspects to love that I want to explore more. Love is at the center of everything that we call good and true in this world. I realize how many times I have heard this said in life. The Beatles have put some variation of this truth in their songs no less than 8,196 times.* In just in focusing my thoughts on the role love plays in my life I am discovering these truths in much greater detail than I had before. I could run with this topic down until my fingers are nubs. However, I will only dedicate the next few posts exploring why love is some important and what does love do for us/to us. Perhaps we can all benefit from an out loud truth finding conversation about the most important thing in our lives…ever.
I am running out of time this week. I am breaking away from an engagement that I could not avoid to write this, so I apologize for the brevity of this post. Next week I will continue exploring aspects of love. I will also attempt to introduce a framework for how I will go about this exploration so I can be more organized in my thoughts.
Until next week!
*Entirely fabricated, but you get the point.