Expanding the Definition of Love
“ONE BUT MANY…One God, many faces. One family, many races. One truth, many paths. One heart, many complexions. One light, many reflections. One world, many imperfections. ONE. We are all one, But many.” Suzy Kassem (1975- ) American writer, poet, philosopher, and multi-faceted artist of Egyptian origin.
So many of us talk about love… who we love and why we love them, what we love and don’t love, what we would love to have more or less of in our lives. When I think about love… the kind of love one reads about but for many of us never truly get to experience… I think of Shakespeare’s poem:
“Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken."
I think there are all kinds of love, in reality…romantic love, platonic love, passionate love, tender love, love that serves a purpose or a time but can change as needs or relationships change, love that can grow from a feeling of lust into something deeper and more resilient.
But is there a higher-level love? A big-L Love. The kind of love that people of a deep faith in a higher Being strive to know and experience. One that can envelop all of these and yet is something greater. A kind of love that we can keep in our hearts that will teach us more about the possibilities that love holds as we continue to learn as individuals and as a collective; something that we can aspire to feeling and expressing that will help guide us in these increasingly challenging times?
If I read Shakespeare’s poem and consider how that notion of love could be considered as part of a physical law that governs nature, the concepts of coherence, resonance, expansion, collaboration, flow, and cohesion come to mind. The opposite of those are incoherence, dissonance, contraction, resistance, and discord. When we look at our world today, so much seems to be falling apart. Many of our conversations and experiences – at least at the collective level - feel incoherent, limited in potential for finding solutions; there is a lack of trust and cohesion in and between our communities.
If you read my previous blog on the power of paradox, you’ll know that it’s possible to hold two seemingly contradictory beliefs or statements to be true. If we apply this to how we feel and demonstrate love and how we move forward in finding solutions for a more equitable world, we may need to redefine and up-level our definition of love. We may feel a strong impulse to judge our neighbor, friend or family member for a comment or behavior based on our value system or how we imagine we might speak or act in their situation; we may feel an impulse to deny love to someone who has displayed an act of selfishness or ignorance at a time when kindness and humility would be a better path. And we wouldn’t necessarily be wrong in feeling that way. Our values, to a large degree, define who we are. Where we may want to expand our container of love to hold space for each of us as we learn and grow, is to find a way to ask more questions or consider other perspectives that can lead to the possibility of creating a place of deeper compassion for what someone else might be going through: maybe that person just came from the hospital after visiting a sick loved one and is in great distress, maybe that person is working two or more jobs to support their family and is acting out from a place of exhaustion, or maybe that person has just had a harrowing experience themselves and is responding out of fear.
We all come at our lives and the challenges we face from our own unique experiences and perspectives. They provide the lens through which we look at life and our circumstances. By making space for the possibility that not everyone is an idiot (hard to believe sometimes, I know), or ignorant, or losing their mind, we allow for more humanity to enter our lives…more compassion and possibility for healing.
Now, that said, I am a HUGE believer in boundaries. Where we may be able to forgive people their transgressions, there are times where strong boundaries are absolutely needed because some of us have built up habits centered around negativity or abuse that I do not believe are acceptable in loving, trusting relationships.
So, let’s look to each other for support as we learn to model this bigger LOVE I believe exists in the deeper recesses of our hearts; let’s create space for mistakes to be made and errors to be resolved so we can continue to find ways to partner with trust, collaboration, flow, and a sense of cohesion and expansion in our search for collective solutions.