If I consider what love is, what immediately comes up are the various things I have over many years learned the word love means and how those meanings have played out in my life. It is a word of expression, with some powerful and grand meanings, but is also used in day to day life by much of the world, myself included, in quite casual ways.
At the powerful end of the spectrum we have notions like ‘God is Love’, and ‘All you need is Love’ and at the other end are the innumerable things we might say we love, be it chocolate, coffee, surfing, nature, a hobby, a movie, a book, a car, a pair of shoes or anything else that we might also describe as ‘to die for’. Then, somewhere else in our grey matter we have a place for all the facets of romantic love – the notion of ‘making love’ and the emotional roller-coaster that is falling in and out of love.
As babies, before we learn any word for love or have any concepts about it, we could only know it as a quality we feel, ignited by the expressions of affection, care and nurturing we receive from our parents and family. So, as babies we would have a certain expertise in love, by feeling and knowing the simplicity of it without the filtering of any words or concepts about it – and we would also implicitly be expert in what is not love.
As adults, it seems we have lost that expertise we had as babies, as love becomes increasingly broad and complicated, becoming everything that life shows and teaches us it is, a word with many meanings and uses, both powerful and trivial, and all of which change and develop as we grow up through childhood into adult life.
That broadness and complexity characterises my personal experience of love for most of my life. And while I did at some point in childhood forget or cease to register within myself the simplicity of love in that directness with which we all knew it as babies, in the last few years I have begun to unravel that complexity by feeling and knowing love in its simplicity once again.
That unravelling is as if to remove the word ‘love’ itself, with its many different meanings and usages, in order to reconnect directly with the quality I knew it to be back when I was expert at it – by how love feels and just as importantly by how what is not love feels.
For me, this has been very much a ‘getting to the bottom’ of what love is, and what is not love, by coming to understand in honesty just how much I was contributing to the pool of what is not love, and observing how, like a poison, what I was contributing to penetrates and affects every aspect of society.
I realised, by looking at how I was in my own home, my workplace and all my interactions with others out in the world, that while I had basic values of decency and respect for others, those values weren’t foundational as I could and at times did drop below them, readily expressing or acting towards others in ways that they would definitely feel was not love. In that state I reserved the right to depart from those values of decency and respect with a sense of justification or entitlement to give others what I believed they deserved, often expressing my dissatisfaction with or contempt for them. I noticed how I didn’t feel out of place in the world by behaving this way – I just felt like part of it, normal, as if it was how the world had taught me to be and wanted me to be.
Consider that the pool of what is not love is everything that is founded on the absence of decency and respect that we, as a society, say is OK. We all then would contribute to the pool to the extent we express and act towards others without decency and respect, and beyond that allow and bring harm to others. What we contribute circulates from our homes to our workplaces, to our schools, our universities, our sports fields, our music, our news, entertainment and social media, our governments, rendering them all effectively to be the loveless places and things they are. This, all the way to our parliaments – the pinnacle of what we like to call civilisation.
And from that pinnacle, where lovelessness is a most highly valued and sought after attribute, and decency and respect are paid lip service at best, our contributions to that pool of everything that is not love then percolate back downward to us through the laws our parliaments make, and the laws they don’t, all of which reinforces everything we are as a society, whose values are permeated and founded on the absence of decency and respect. And so, everywhere we go, everywhere we look, it is no surprise to find in abundance everything that is not love.
We have made that our normal. And in honesty I see, feel and know the part I have played as a contributor to what makes this possible.
However, I have changed in the last few years – significantly – by making decency and respect my unshakeable foundation across the board, in all of my relationships and interactions – whether it’s with my wife, my family, my work colleagues, those I share the roads with, at the supermarket checkout, on social media, or on the phone to someone from a call centre in another country. An equally important aspect of this is how I am with anyone who may not be expressing or acting towards me with decency and respect and whether I ‘give it back’ or hold steady and let them feel and know the love of decency and respect nonetheless from me.
As I now understand love and live it in my life, having made decency and respect foundational qualities in all my interactions and relationships, everything else that love is and can be follows. Love, in its simplicity and power – the capacity to love through other richer expressions such as affection, care, nurturing, tenderness and, most importantly, giving others the space to live and evolve in their own way, which may not be same as our way.
What exposed to me how given I was to lovelessness, was an encounter with just one person who reflected something different to me. Such was the impact of that one encounter, in a world that teaches us that what is not love is normal, where any encounter with a true expression of love stands out a mile.
And that one encounter was a life changer, as I felt the simplicity of love quite directly once again, reviving me to that awareness from which unfolded what I now live and understand love to be.
