LOVE(2) [VALENTINE'S DAY 2002]
+ SHOULDER UPDATE
[I wrote this to celebrate Valentine's Day and then missed my intended date. I can't blame it on my shoulder or anything else except poor planning. I hope you'll enjoy it in the spirit given even if it seems late.]
We all enjoy reading or hearing children's comments on serious subjects. In their innocence, they often have surprising insights. A friend recently sent me a list of children's responses to the question "what does love mean?". One answer in particular struck me: "If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend whom you hate." (This was from a 6-year old girl.) This child captured a number of ideas in one simple sentence. One, the meaning of love is hard to express in abstract words, it needs to be found in experience. Second, implicitly, we do want to learn to love better. Three, that you can "hate" a friend. And, finally, to love someone you "hate" is the ultimate expression of love.
Love is something we all seek, something we know when we find, but something hard to put into words. In some sense, the ability to love is innate. In my view, we all have the capacity to love. We may repress it, we may never find the occasion to express it, but we all can give love. I watch the most misogynistic, loveless people I know express love for pets. I watch hoodlums express love for their mothers. I've seen enough to know that the ability to love is in everyone, if the right love object is present. I also believe we all have the capacity to receive love. Many of us feel unloved but even the worst of us still hope for love. The mothers of the hoodlums I mentioned, some of the worst people I can imagine, murderers even, love their children. I've tried to define love in words and am not satisfied with my efforts. It's something beyond the strongest "like", it includes a self-less quality, it's beyond the chemical, but these things don't capture love. I'll have to be satisfied with "I know it when I see it."
Notwithstanding my previous thoughts, I think we also all fear that we aren't good at love, that we must improve in order to be loved, that there are things to be learned to make us worth loving. Even a 6-year old speaks of learning to love better. I believe that love is perfect. If we love, we don't need to learn more. If we receive love, we may respond imperfectly but that's because we're ungenerous, ungrateful, blind, not because we need to know more about love.
One of the things which amused me in the 6-year old's thought was the idea of "hating" a friend and that you could love someone you hate. Of course, we know what she meant: That she was temporarily annoyed at a friend, that she was momentarily disaffected by a friend, that she was angry at a friend. But she also expressed an interesting thought: That you can love and hate someone at the same time. Now she didn't mean love as I mean it. She wasn't talking about deep, undefinable feelings towards others, she was talking about something I might call "like". But she was on to something important. I view love and hate as opposites but I also accept that you can consciously eliminate hatred from your life by trying to love people you might be inclined to hate. And that's my real message here. Hatred is entirely negative, entirely unproductive, completely useless, something we must not feel. Without being sugary, if we can start with the perspective that we will try to love others in the sense the young girl meant it, we will eliminate the emotion of hate from our lives. It's worth a try.
[I think my shoulder continues to improve although the surgeon told me I've been trying to do too much. He also told me he refused to repair it if I pulled the stitches out so I'm being more careful again. I continue to be grateful to my surgeon and modern medical techniques, to my friends and to my colleagues. Things are so much easier than I expected. ]
2-18-02
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