All you Need is Love

The Beatles said, “Love is All You Need.”  I have fought this for a long time, I think because I have understood the concept of love poorly, because the feeling of love, the desire felt when we are in ‘love’ can be easy, and fleeting, but is not always sustained as easily.  The misconception is not that love is all you need, but that love takes a lot of work.  Not because it is hard to love people and things for a time, but because it is hard to live a life daily based upon the concept of love, acting with love, giving grace, having gratitude, and sometimes making hard but good decisions, like advocating for what is right but unpopular, honoring a commitment that is good but not fun, and setting boundaries with loved ones for their betterment, or your own. 

Love, most often is associated with two major relationships- romantic (partners) or parent to child (unconditional love)- if you are so lucky.  Romantic love- Passion, desire, longing- these are parts of it.  They are good parts, but not the best or only parts.  Parent to child, is love unconditional at its best, but when people are broken their capacity for love does not always fill the well of love their child may have capacity for. 

Love is more than these relationships- love is all the respect and kindness that you behave with in the world.  I hold the door for a stranger- an act of kindness from love.  They do not thank you- unrequited love- their loss.  But why hold it against them?  Perhaps their capacity is small, and perhaps your gesture fills or expands their capacity. 

If we forever extend our love and kindness to others, how can we live with regret?  Truth to the genuine self is acting in a state of love for others, of course in hopes that there will be return, but even upon no return, do you have regret? 

Regret is a deep state of emotional debt. Emotional debt translates to ‘things left unsaid or undone.’  Genuine and assertive communication of your thoughts and feelings, the things we wish we would have done but did not, decreases and sometimes cancels emotional debt.  That is not to say that the collector of this expression or deed is capable, or receptive to receiving it.  Emotions, thoughts, feelings and love are ours to give, the giving is all we control.  Regret becomes resentment either to others or to self.  Live each day with love and kindness to self and others, and you will have peace.

Did I do all I could do for them?  Did I do all I could, in my capacity today?  If you can say yes, I did that with love and kindness, then you can be at peace. And sometimes our capacities might be small, needing, or empty, and so we can be grateful to others who give to us.

Love is an action word. Love can be so simple, small acts of kindness that create a ripple effect. Smile at people, look them in the eye, greet them.  The flutter of that moment might be the catalyst for their life. That moment of interruption from their spiraling thoughts may ground them in the love and light that goodness imparts. 

A person can walk into a room and feel tension, anger, sadness and sorrow.  The reverse is also true, gratitude, joy, and compassion can also be felt.  The positive emotions seem to need to try a lot harder to make their presence felt, possibly because these emotions are harder to achieve and harder to sustain, and just the same they can be passed on and along to an open receiver. 

Hate is easy to choose: because it is anchored in so many other underlying negative emotions- fear, sadness, guilt, shame... Like love, hate is also an action word. Too often, when we are afraid, when we are sad, when we feel we have wronged, or have hatred for ourselves, we turn it outward. Self-compassion is a practice I often find people struggle with the most, particularly if it is difficult to live our values, to embrace your imperfections, and to strive upward. We can usually extend compassion to others- until we feel our unstable sense of self challenged. Then, in the face of adversity, that same sense of self that we show little compassion for becomes a soldier for self-validation, a tool of hate, rather than a mechanism for change, understanding, acceptance and love; as outward discontent has now manifested into a defense from looking inward.

God is love.  Perhaps that is why it is harder to achieve, because this is a far more complex emotion, one of divinity, as it is the one emotion that all people recognize that does not serve itself. 

Perhaps the best way to characterize love in daily life is self-lessness.  Love is a never ending loop- the more love you give, the more love you receive; and that may be because the more you give selfless love the more you can find love for yourself.