As I recently stated, there are two things that make life worth living: passion, and love.
Some people say that love is something that happens to you. You fall into it. You surrender to it. Some people say that love is a series of chemical reactions in the brain. They say that it's "nothing more than a feeling".
Those people are wrong, at least partly.
Some people say you should be careful with whom and how you fall in love. These people differentiate between "true love" and that which is not true. They say love is rare. They say you can't love what you don't know. They say you must guard your heart against making the mistake of loving the wrong person.
Those people are wrong, too.
Let's consider first the argument that love is a feeling. This is perhaps the fault of our language which is, to paraphrase William Golding, the straight-jacket of our experience. We say that we "feel love." In this way, we equate love with other feelings - other chemical reactions - like euphoria, sadness, excitement. In truth, these are not good comparisons. These feelings are all simply states of being. We don't feel love the way we feel happiness or sadness. The feeling we call love is a feeling of perception, not merely a state of being. We say that we *are* sad, but we say that we are *in* love. With these word choices we reveal that we perceive sadness as a state of being that defines us, but love as something that we feel when it envelops us, just as we feel the sun when its warmth envelops us.
Love, unlike sadness or happiness, is also uniquely a feeling that is also a verb. You can't sad, you can't hungry. You can only *be* these things. But look at how we use the word love: we love our family, we love our friends, we love the city, we love the mountains. Love is an action. We are the doers and receivers of an action called love. We love and are loved. Although the feeling of love originates within us, unlike other feelings, it always and necessarily involves both a subject and an object. We cannot feel love unless someone is engaged in the act of loving, whether it is our own act of love towards others that we feel, or others' acts of love towards us.
If love is an action, does that then mean that it's a choice? Absolutely. Love is not just something we fall into, surrender to, or something that happens to us (although it does indeed often have its way with us). We can choose to love as easily as we can choose to climb mountains, which is to say: with purpose and intention. We don't (usually) find ourselves suddenly at the top of the mountain without having chosen to get there, but if we make up our minds and set out for the summit with purpose, we will eventually arrive.
The trickier question is whether we can choose not to love. We can certainly harden our hearts and close ourselves to the possibility of love for people and things. Perhaps because someone has the wrong religion, the wrong politics, or the wrong ideas, we close ourselves from the potential to love them. We find it much more difficult to choose to stop loving, which is perhaps why we begin to speak of love as something uncontrollable that happens to us. Once we've begun to love someone, whether absent-mindedly or with fullness of purpose, we have a hard time stopping. Love is addictive. We are truly "hooked on a feeling." Love is addictive because, like anything else addictive, it feels good when we're doing it. The cynics who talk about love being a series of chemical reactions aren't wrong (they're just not seeing the whole picture).
Those of you familiar with my stance on addiction will know that I don't consider addiction per se to be a negative thing. It is addiction to harmful and damaging things which is negative. Indeed, could there be anything better than addiction to something which is only beneficial? Love, like anything else addictive, is addictive even when it hurts. And like most things that are addictive, it's the sudden absence of our drug of choice that makes us hurt.
The good news is, there's no permanent damage done. We've all been hurt. Many of us have fallen in love and had our hearts broken. Or maybe we've lost a loved one to illness and death. Yet here we stand today…and we're all just fine. Most of us, in fact, are better than fine. We have wonderful memories that remind us what the great possibilities for our lives are. We often retain deep bonds with our former lovers that, despite all the difficulties and the heartache, remain much stronger than our other human connections.
Some people, recoiling from the pain of heartbreak, are like the addict going clean: they steel their hearts and determine never to love again. I'd like to suggest a second option: soften your heart and determine to love more. (We could call it the ibogaine option.) If it's the absence of love that is causing you pain, then go get more love. It's inexpensive, can be found anywhere, it's infinitely reproducible, and a steady supply has no known negative side effects.
The only reason we think we can't just go out and get more love is because we insist upon creating an artificial shortage. We create a false economy of love with all our admonishments to be careful with whom and how we fall in love, with our hesitancy and our guarded hearts, with our insistence that true love is rare and everything else we might think is love is false. It seems that we are afraid that if love is common, it won't be valuable. That if we love everyone, then our love for our chosen life partner is less significant. This couldn't be further from the truth. Is air less valuable because it is abundant? Is water? Love is as critical to our health and well-being as air and water, so let's sow it as common as dandelions and know that that makes it no less special or important.
Let's choose love. Let's create love. Let's be love.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Thursday, April 7, 2011
On passion
The two things that I believe make life worth living, and give humanity any hope of surviving, are love and passion.
Passion seems to be the easy one. Passion is what invigorates you, what you do for the pure experience of doing it, what makes you wake up in the morning happy to be what you are.
It's cliché to say, but Burning Man changed my life. I had heard of the giant party that was Burning Man, and that was true. I had heard of the freedom and self-expression that was Burning Man, and that was true, too. What I wasn't prepared for was the way Burning Man would shake my emotional foundations. A campmate said to me, "We all bring our own baggage to Burning Man." Even as I tried to treat Burning Man as a vacation to get away from it all, it all weighed on me and made itself known.
Everything I tried not to think about and tried not to acknowledge, everything I buried so deep inside of me came bubbling to the surface in that desert. The lies I told myself to get by in the real world became transparent on the playa, prompted by nothing in particular except the radical honesty of the culture I was temporarily inhabiting. It was contagious, this honesty. I wrote letters to friends from the depths of myself, expressing my true feelings without fear of misunderstanding or poor reception. Most importantly, I was honest with myself for the first time in a long time. I confronted my fears, I admitted my desires, I reveled in my inherent self.
And on the night of the temple burn, just when I was thinking I'd figured this whole thing out, I cried. I cried without knowing why I was crying, only that there was a deep and aching sadness inside of me. I cried because I felt alone in a crowd of 50,000 friendly strangers and a dozen close friends. I cried because I felt that I wasn't supposed to cry and because I wanted nothing more than to cry. I cried for every vague moment of sadness that year that I had ignored and pushed down into a tiny little ball inside of me.
Later, after the burn, I sat and talked with two campmates who were also struggling. In a moment of clarity, after lamenting the conditions of my off-playa life, I said, "It's just that I have nothing in my life that I'm truly passionate about."
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew how true they were, and was amazed that I had ignored such a simple fact for so long. I was stuck in a rut of work and mundane socializing, with no connection to a larger picture, no impact on the world, no projects I was completing--nothing that I could say I was truly passionate about. Of course I was unhappy. I resolved then and there that when I returned to Camp Reality, I would make passion a priority and not an afterthought.
Upon returning, some of the first things I did were: to re-enroll in belly dance courses to remain passionately connected with my body. To resume my volunteer activities with the local animal shelter, to remain passionately connected with my community. To honestly address my relationships with the people closest to me, to remain passionately connected to my loved ones. And, to get a tattoo that would forever remind me that passion should be a priority, and not a last resort:
I will never again forget the importance of passion in my life. My commitment to myself is to live my life, always, with passion.
I'm very much looking forward to Burning Man 2011.
As for love, that'll have to wait for another blog post that I promise will be coming soon.
Passion seems to be the easy one. Passion is what invigorates you, what you do for the pure experience of doing it, what makes you wake up in the morning happy to be what you are.
It's cliché to say, but Burning Man changed my life. I had heard of the giant party that was Burning Man, and that was true. I had heard of the freedom and self-expression that was Burning Man, and that was true, too. What I wasn't prepared for was the way Burning Man would shake my emotional foundations. A campmate said to me, "We all bring our own baggage to Burning Man." Even as I tried to treat Burning Man as a vacation to get away from it all, it all weighed on me and made itself known.
Everything I tried not to think about and tried not to acknowledge, everything I buried so deep inside of me came bubbling to the surface in that desert. The lies I told myself to get by in the real world became transparent on the playa, prompted by nothing in particular except the radical honesty of the culture I was temporarily inhabiting. It was contagious, this honesty. I wrote letters to friends from the depths of myself, expressing my true feelings without fear of misunderstanding or poor reception. Most importantly, I was honest with myself for the first time in a long time. I confronted my fears, I admitted my desires, I reveled in my inherent self.
And on the night of the temple burn, just when I was thinking I'd figured this whole thing out, I cried. I cried without knowing why I was crying, only that there was a deep and aching sadness inside of me. I cried because I felt alone in a crowd of 50,000 friendly strangers and a dozen close friends. I cried because I felt that I wasn't supposed to cry and because I wanted nothing more than to cry. I cried for every vague moment of sadness that year that I had ignored and pushed down into a tiny little ball inside of me.
Later, after the burn, I sat and talked with two campmates who were also struggling. In a moment of clarity, after lamenting the conditions of my off-playa life, I said, "It's just that I have nothing in my life that I'm truly passionate about."
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew how true they were, and was amazed that I had ignored such a simple fact for so long. I was stuck in a rut of work and mundane socializing, with no connection to a larger picture, no impact on the world, no projects I was completing--nothing that I could say I was truly passionate about. Of course I was unhappy. I resolved then and there that when I returned to Camp Reality, I would make passion a priority and not an afterthought.
Upon returning, some of the first things I did were: to re-enroll in belly dance courses to remain passionately connected with my body. To resume my volunteer activities with the local animal shelter, to remain passionately connected with my community. To honestly address my relationships with the people closest to me, to remain passionately connected to my loved ones. And, to get a tattoo that would forever remind me that passion should be a priority, and not a last resort:
I will never again forget the importance of passion in my life. My commitment to myself is to live my life, always, with passion.
I'm very much looking forward to Burning Man 2011.
As for love, that'll have to wait for another blog post that I promise will be coming soon.
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