What Is Love: A Philosophical Take on How to Love “Me”
No this is not an ode to the song. I was meditating this morning and felt a strong urge, I trust myself, to define for the outside world how I want to use this word Love and if you want to use it with me, how you can do so. Love is such a vast subject with a multitude of definitions, understandings, and concepts wrapped around it in so many different models of the world. I want to take a moment and demystify what I think Love is and how I want to use that word myself and how you can use that word when you are with me, talking with me or engaging with me in some way now.
As a definition, understanding, and concept, I put forth that Love is this: Very simply put, Love is a kind of attention you pay that gives rise to particular actions, ultimately allowing room for you to pay more of that kind of attention. To use a metaphor, if love is the ground below, then the actions you take as a result of Love, i.e.: Loving, is the nurturing you do to that ground that allows things to grow in it, maybe even room enough for a garden. If you do not care for the earth and for the earth in the right way, she will not produce the kind of garden you want. The seeds you plant there must be aligned with the kind of plants you want to see and the seasons with which these things can grow.
As I said before, to me, that is Love and true Love, not just infatuation or lust although these are separate kinds of attention you can pay giving rise to separate actions which may or may not fall under the umbrella of Love but at the very least may or may not lead to it and are not one and the same.
Now, you have ideas that come up like for example, a man who loves his wife but has stopped doing all the things she loved about him and loved for him to do. He is not Loving her and as a result the Love will eventually run out because he’s not paying the particular kind of attention required for the actions to be taken giving rise to further Love which means, to use a separate metaphor, the actions are not being taken that wil continue to allow the fire that Love is to continue to warm the both of them … the fire will eventually die. He’s not taking the actions of putting wood back on the fire and tending it in the right way. Eventually it will become dark for the both of them and without looking inside, they will try and seek out sources of this light - feeling their way around in the dark.
Now, moving beyond that, the kind of attention you pay, Love, is not given to you -this next point may seem counterintuitive- by someone else. That is, if I Love you, and you feel loved as a result, my argument is that the Love you feel is NOT coming from me but is coming from inside you. When I give you Love (when I pay attention to you in this particular kind of way) I do not lose it. I have not given it away because what is inside me, Love, cannot go away. It is the sun behind the clouds that hides from view at times but is never gone nor disappeared nor faded. That Love was always there inside you and now you are just paying attention to that Love inside you in a particular kind of way giving rise to a particular set of actions … actions NOT required to keep that Love alive.
That’s the whole thing in a nutshell and how I choose myself to use this word Love and how I think you can use it if you want to use it in connection with me be that today or some day in a beautiful future I’m not sure everyone is capable of creating by virtue of how they can pay attention to how they pay attention to it. Thanks. We’ll talk soon.
