Something I've been thinking about a lot these days is love. Love is a very loaded word, so let me try to disambiguate. I started this line of thought actually wondering what love even means. Love is sexual, it is romantic, it is sacred, it is also personal and communal at the same time. It's a tricky thing. I boiled it down to love being the feeling you get when someone really cares about you. Or at least that's what being loved feels like. Giving love is similar.

I've been wondering to myself about this craving I have for love. On the surface it can seem like craving for sexual satisfaction, horniness if you will, but that's not the entirety of it. The actual main component is the desire of being embraced, totally and completely. Sure, sex is an excellent vehicle for this as it breaks down our usual barriers and allows us to more easily be one with the other, but sex is not the only way. I imagine many people actually get this feeling from their religion (i.e., being loved by God or feeling one with nature), and many possibly get it from other places: being valued at work, kids, community...

This made me realize actually how rare it is for someone to love (in this way) someone else! We are almost always thinking just about ourselves, pursuing the next thing that (we think) will make us happy. We're utterly consumed by this effort, day and night. Imagine how much of a difference you would make if you allowed yourself to love, really love, those around you?

Love is not a promise of safety, nor is true love a monogamous thing. Real love goes beyond that and is an unconditional way of saying, "This life is infinitely better for having you in it."

Well then, the question becomes how to do it. I don't really have the answer, but (as pointed above) I think we do know why we don't do it: because we're too centered on our own shit. It's unlikely that we'll manage to get rid of our stuff during this lifetime, so perhaps the best way to get out of this attitude is to recognize that same shit in everyone else.

Of course, this is hard, as we don't really want to deal with more stuff than we're already dealing with. I don't mean to say one should look for how others suffer (though there's plenty to find there), more that we should see our shared humanity, see how we're all just craving to be loved, how we're all scared of the things we don't understand, how we all desire to be happy in the deepest core of ourselves, to be loved. From this recognition springs compassion, for others and oneself, and compassion is the bridge over which true connections can be made.

That's something I really like about blogs, that you really get to see this shared humanity right there on the page. You see the author dealing with the same stuff you're dealing with, and you see them fail over and over and over, and yet you never stop rooting for them, wishing they could see how awesome they really are.

If you can¹, think about how much you want to be loved, then think about how little love others around you are receiving.

~ 🌱

---

Footnotes

1. It should also be said that loving others is much easier if one feels good with oneself. Take care of yourself first, but keep these ideas in mind as you do so. ↩