Month: September 2021

What is Love Anyways?

Howard Jones musically asked, “What is love anyway? Does anybody love anybody anyway?” Well Howard, I think I’ve got the answer for you.

Love is a very ambiguous term. I love pickles and I love my cat. I love my brother and flowers. I love to travel and I love rich Excel spreadsheets. I love oceans and I love refreshing naps. Clearly these are not all the same things.

One way we can sort out some of this ambiguity is to first understand that love is a noun, verb and adjective.

All of those things above refer to the noun. When I say I love pickles, I am saying that this is a characteristic of me that spans the indefinite and definite. The indefinite means I’m saying I do and will love all pickles, (which isn’t entirely true since I dislike bread & butter pickles, but this doesn’t matter right now), and the definite says that if you place a pickle in front of me, I will love it. Irrespective whether the many or the one, I am referring to a love that exists in my head and hence forms part of my being. So it can safely be said that I love pickles, because I do.

This gives rise to the adjective. Because I love pickles, I am a….pickle lover. Is it a descriptive way to understand my being. I didn’t pick and choose whether I should love pickles, I just do. So if you want to better understand something, think of those things it loves and you can safely use those things as factual descriptors to better understand something without judgment or undue labelling.

The most interesting understanding of love is the verb, because we are what we do (and intentionally don’t do). If somebody loves something you would expect them to act in ways to be loving. Assumedly, love compels us to do things we otherwise would not do. A father crosses a crowded room to kiss his son. An uncle sits in awful traffic to pick up a niece from the airport. A partner overcomes their psychological issues to have a successful relationship in the present. An individual moves to Africa to rescue elephants. A person stops eating animal products to prevent the suffering of animals. An individual goes to undergraduate studies to later pursue medicine. These may all demonstrate the verb version of love, and as is evident, these are the version of love that matters.

I’ve previously written that our souls create both attractive and repulsive internal forces that compel us to action (and our egos try to hijack and sabotage these). These forces may all originate from love, I don’t know. What I do know is that unless we demonstrate love in action, it is of no value to the universe. The noun and the adjective merely fill our minds with labels and states, but only the verb can carry out the will of love, and this is why we have arms, legs, voices, literacy, and all the other tools of love. Love has compelled songs, self improvement, monuments, relocation, and vast accommodation. Love in action has been confused and conflated with symbology and proxies, which is a peril to be avoided.

Quite practically, if you love someone and your baggage prevents you from having a healthy relationship with them, you will put everything you’ve got into overcoming your baggage (and not make up excuses). If you love the environment, you will put everything you’ve got to sustaining its integrity and continuity (and not find exceptions). If you love yourself and find yourself imbalanced in life, you will show love in correcting this (and not tolerate alternatives).

Haddaway shied away from love that “hurt me”, and well, that ain’t love. Love takes bravery and tenaciousness, and an utter intolerance for that love not to be expressed, despite how much it costs. Love is unilateral and has no opposition but the ego, so it should flow as love is intended.

This is not to suggest that love is expressed stupidly. If you love something that refuses your love, (or any love) the only thing that changes is the expression of your love. Parents love their young children and heap upon them versions of affection that change as the child grows and accepts love from others. Love is not inflexible; love adapts to give love in the ways that are achievable unidirectionally. The child goes into the world and receives more of a loving check-in, loving safety net, and loving distance versus the abundant physical affection and loving proximity.

So as we contemplate ‘what is love’, there are many answers however only one matters. Love is what we do to express love in a nonsymbolic way that is tailored to the recipient.

Fear

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Winston Churchill uttered this famous quote as the Prime Minister of the UK during World War II, where the Germans would bomb London nightly to foment fear and break the spirit of the people. He feared not death, nor terror, nor loss of institutions or heirlooms or comfort, he feared fear. Why?

Fear is not what anyone or anything can do to us, it is what we create as we interpret external risks and threats. So fear is how we cripple ourselves and create a present that causes us to be edgy, erratic, and irrational.

Should we not be fearful of disease, crime, or meteor strikes? No. We should be aware and appropriately cautious, and once those measures have been prudently adopted, our present moments must be free of the fear that the ego wants to inject until those threats actually become realized, at which time fear is still not the appropriate response. In horror movies, what happens to the screaming fleeing person? They usually fall, alert the killer, or otherwise do things that create actual peril where there is little. The killer just walks calmly toward the flailing spaz and gets the job done. It is the fear that amplifies the danger, and the fear that prevents more productive responses to avoid harm.

Our fears are not just the big pronounced ones, like being a victim of a heinous crime, but they are small and insidious too. We fear being loved less, becoming less attractive, looking foolish, not fitting in, having our social media post ridiculed. We feel fear almost constantly and it causes us to act in outrageous and harmful ways. We buy things we cannot afford, say things that aren’t true, act in ways that certainly are not who we are, trash talk people, discriminate, hide from the world, turn a blind eye to injustice, or pretend to care about something because it’s a popular thing to do. And ironic part? Acting to avoid fears makes our fears come to fruition. It makes us lose friends, alienate family, go broke, waste time, get fired, become anxious, develop addictions, and so on. Fear is our greatest enemy, and we think it is our best friend and saviour.

Personally I’d rather live for one day absent of fear than for 10 lifetimes with fear. Fear makes us someone else. Fear makes us act detestably and sabotage our most cherished things. Fear dominates our present with future horrors, which we end up bringing on ourselves. If we spend our living years being fearful of death, we are already dead because we have killed our present. If we spend our hike fearful of a bear attack, we have already been attacked because our entire present was fixated on the emergence of the bear. So what do we have to fear? Fear itself.

When fear creeps in, you’ll likely know its presence. When you’re ready to stop living in fear, whatever it tells you to do, do the exact opposite. Literally the exact opposite. You don’t want to confront your mom because you fear it’ll break the relationship with your kids? If that relationship is so tenuous that it’ll end because of healthy conflict, it should end – so it can be built in a healthier manner. You are holding yourself hostage to a fear that is very likely unreal, and the gun to your head exists only in your mind. No matter what the fear, no matter what you believe the consequence, do the exact opposite. No matter the outcome, you will be living life authentically, presently, and no longer as a hostage or victim to what you believe is waiting to befoul you.

If Churchill recognized the paramountcy of the threat of fearful living while having bombs dropped on his countrypeople nightly, while the Nazis advanced and killed millions in awful ways and seemed poised to take over the world to impose eugenics, while the economies of the world were in shambles, while Italy and Japan were committing atrocities around the world, even after 7 years of brutal war merely 20 years after the last world war, he must have profoundly understood how fear is the most harmful force on the planet. He knew that fear is what underlies all evil, all intentional harm, all man-made suffering. And he knew that it’s what we do to ourselves.