I think we all have a grasp on how to give love, but we're not so clear on how to be loved.
What a complex subject, no? How to complete the circuitry of love? It is not enough to give love; you need to learn how to receive it.
I love you. These scant words are some of the most powerful ever crafted. Just three words, three simple monosyllables carry enough force in their utterance to change your life, fire your passion, calm your fears, and strengthen your heart. It only takes one word, sometimes none at all, to inflict pain, to destroy. But to enliven, to fulfill – these are the words you need.
It’s easy to give love in any of its flavors – strength, submission, sharing, support – but to accept it, to believe in it, to be in it, there’s the witches’ brew. Two people can be in love and yet be painfully torn apart by the dark matter of relationships which seems to amplify the contrasts between them. In time, those contrasts calcify and henceforth every conflict is another hard-toothed grinding on the relationship, slowly wearing down the partners, indifferently cutting away at the bonds of their affection. Like a cancer, it metastasizes as it grows and poisons the healthy connections between you, so that soon there is no sane, safe refuge in your love. Eventually, but not fatalistically, the lovers fall away or flee from each other.
I love you.
It builds and affirms. It gives comfort in uncomfortable silences. It’s a knowing hand that says ‘I am here. I am with you.’
Giving love – the will to intimately connect – the I love you part – is powerful medicine, and is innocently assumed to be soul of a strong relationship, but giving love must be married to accepting love. If everyone speaks and no one listens, there is no conversation, only cacophony. Accepting love is harder for many of us. Since childhood, we’ve known that attention is a precusor to affection, which we crave. We are programmed by feedback that certain behaviors return certain results. If the affection is not forth coming, we revert to the first need: attention. We lash out, we manipulate, and we hurt because it works. Eventually someone will stop you, no? Benign at first, it too grows as we do. It becomes more sophisticated, less blunt, and more surgical. We learn to incorporate distrust into our decisions.
As a young mind begins to peer in on itself, it questions the lack of affection and usually arrives at the naive conclusion that it is lacking, unworthy of affection.
We’ve all walked with strident optimism into those early relationships, nervous and excited at the possibilities, untouched by hurt, only to return shortly later bruised and bewildered. Your hide thickens though, and in many cases becomes a wall of stone.
To some, myself certainly included, a relationship in love can devolve into a game theory; how to maximize affection with the least vulnerability. Boundaries and barriers are established and manned, tests of initiation and validity are undertaken. Scales and scanners are brought out to gauge the other, to evaluate how much vulnerability should be risked in this venture.
But this is the path of diminishing returns and broken hearts. Avoid it, friend. Pull up your sleeves and dive into the tall grass. You will not know the fulfilling, regenerative strength of love until you can accept it as well as give it.
But to accept and embrace the love of another, you must first accept and embrace yourself, complete with flaws and failures.
Only you can open this door, so your lover may join you.
dedicated to my wife, Lee. Semper.
Upload feito por fubuki em 13 Abr '08, 5.29 ART.
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Seu post: I think we all have a grasp on how to give love, but we're not so clear on how to be loved.
What a complex subject, no? How to complete the circuitry of love? It is not enough to give love; you need to learn how to receive it.
I love you. These scant words are some of the most powerful ever crafted. Just three words, three simple monosyllables carry enough force in their utterance to change your life, fire your passion, calm your fears, and strengthen your heart. It only takes one word, sometimes none at all, to inflict pain, to destroy. But to enliven, to fulfill – these are the words you need.
It’s easy to give love in any of its flavors – strength, submission, sharing, support – but to accept it, to believe in it, to be in it, there’s the witches’ brew. Two people can be in love and yet be painfully torn apart by the dark matter of relationships which seems to amplify the contrasts between them. In time, those contrasts calcify and henceforth every conflict is another hard-toothed grinding on the relationship, slowly wearing down the partners, indifferently cutting away at the bonds of their affection. Like a cancer, it metastasizes as it grows and poisons the healthy connections between you, so that soon there is no sane, safe refuge in your love. Eventually, but not fatalistically, the lovers fall away or flee from each other.
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20.9.08
love: a user's manual
You only live twice.
Life changes. You change. It's the only constant.
Three weeks ago I made a day trip to Las Pozas, the estate of the late Edward James. James was a sculptor cum patron of the surrealist movement. He was close friends with Salvador Dali and Andre Breton; in fact, Dali basically said James was completely bat shit and the craziest person he had ever met! James built a pleasure garden of surreal sculpture and architecture deep in the rain forests of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains in eastern Mexico. By map and finger tracing, it's a two hour drive from San Miguel, but in reality its a slow, winding 6 hour journey along deadman curves along two thousand foot cliffs. On a good road trip, you can put your mind to pasture and melt into your music, but this drive demands the nervous vigilance of cobra charmers and chainsaw jugglers. But the view is to die for...literally. Sheer cliffs of slutty green rain forest where the clouds are a quarter mile below surround you for grindingly slow, hard right, hard left, brake riding hours. At one moment, I came out of a sharp turn to face this gorgeous tropical chasm and I smiled, just as I went into another sharp turn. For some reason, someone had laid down gravel in this next blind curve. Gravel has a low traction coefficient. Enter Newton and classical circular motion physics. Gravel slides. I slid with the efficient centrifugal force of failure towards the cliff edge.
Ah Death, we meet again, you mountebank.
All the while, Shirley Bassey is crooning the James Bond classic 'You Only Live Twice' on my iPod.
Your life doesn't flash before your eyes. Adrenaline is not an introspective drug.
Shit. The only rational image in my head was that I was going to fall into a pool of green for several minutes and no one would ever know where I died. I was going to disappear. Pebble in a pond. You hear these lamentable stories of folks driving off I-95 in Florida into a swamp groove, trapped by broken limbs, living off packets of ketchup until death collects them and road crews find the remains several weeks later. I wasn't going to be that fortunate. I was three hours away from the nearest nowhere.
This dream is for you, so pay the price.
Make one dream come true, you only live twice.
I want to pause for a minute to lay down a shout out to the brainstem and its 500,000 million year of fight-flight reflex programming. The brainstem doesn't wait around for the frontal lobe to form a quorum. He's the ultimate go-to guy once adrenaline wakes him up.
My brainstem turned hard against the turn, cutting the kinetic slide into the forest maw and the truck came to a slow stop right at the edge of the road. Final scene forstalled.
And life restarted. Again.
Its a crying shame we need these cataclysmic events to quiet the muddled congress of our thoughts. Everything becomes a very simple calculus when you get it that life is not short and it is not long. It just is. There is no shortcut out of the maze of mirrors. You are here and then you are not. Normally we come to this point and think, 'Hey, life has no guarantees so the smart play is to live for today, seize the day, live for the moment,' but that's just living life like a serial one-night stander. You wake the next morning feeling a little sated but seedy. Its the gambler's path, irrationally betting everything that the next roll will be the big payoff. Conversely, the long view is its own delusion. It suckers and succors you that everything will be taken care in time, that patience is the toll for success. You let yourself fall asleep to dream about tomorrow.
Here's my prescription the good life: be alive. Take chances. Forget trying to look around the next blind curve. Do something new, not to notch your belt, but to extend yourself into that space where your fear holds court. Live with dignity - protect it in yourself and share it freely with others. Be moderately immoderate. Listen more. Speak with sincerity. Forgive yourself completely, but forgive others more. Yes, life is a wonderful wine cellar to taste and enjoy, but learn to make wine yourself and share it with your friends. Being angry and being afraid are your greatest enemies. Shoot them on sight, but better, give them compassion and honesty; you'll find more often than not that they will willingly surrender the floor once they have been heard. But dont hesitate to put those recalcitrant, tantrumy little bitches on time out if need be and get back to living. The biggest thing is this: Life is not about winning the lottery in the Now or some Tomorrow. For that matter, lottery winners almost always end up broke and broken.
Life is about how you live.
Go figure. It takes a deadman's curve to be alive. Who knew?
Go live, friends, right now...and tomorrow.
Who wants to live forever?
Forever is our today
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