WHAT IS LOVE, LOVE IS TOO ELUSICE

You are as prone to love as the sun is to shine; it being the most delightful and natural employment of the soul. —THOMAS TRAHERNE

LOVE IS TOO ELUSIVE and individualized to permit a definition. However, we can ask, “What can love be?” This is not a definition but a request for an ever-renewed invitation, something we can
keep daring to enter, like Alice persevering in her adventures in Wonderland.

We have described love by identifying its most basic ingredient: connection. The word connection is based on two Latin words: con meaning “together” and nectere meaning to bind or tie. The word was originally spelled connexion to reflect the past tense of the verb nectere, which is nexus. Love is a nexus that can happen along a wide spectrum. It can take many forms, from sending a kind letter to being sexually intimate to feeling a mystical oneness.

We are social animals, so connection is important to our survival. We imagine that connection can outlast our physical life, and thus it is usually included in our idea of a heavenly afterlife. We
picture heaven as a place where we will be united with our loved ones. That makes hell a place of disconnection, exclusion, excommunication. We recall the words of Father Zossima in Fyodor
Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “Hell is the suffering of no longer being able to love.” This gives us an insight into the metaphor of hell: It is more about mourning our love failures than about punishment for not being loving. Love is a connection that is caring, intended for good, respectful
of freedom, and genuinely sensitive to another’s needs, even making those needs as important as our own. This shift in attention to the needs of others deflates our own sense of self-importance.


What power love has to help us let go of ego!
When love is reciprocal, we welcome positive connections from others and extend positive connections to others. A love relationship does not have to be reciprocal or symmetrical, however. It
can be equal between two people or more intense in one person than in the other. A willingness to love someone who does not love us back equally is an example of the generosity of love. It is,
indeed, a spiritual advance to make a dedication such as is expressed in these lines I composed as a personal affirmation:

When love is not the same between us two, I’ll be the one to show more love to you.

Loving will then not feel like a giving, as it does in the ego’s world of quid pro quo. It will be my true self, love, simply being.

Caring connection includes altruism, fondness for someone, concern about what happens to her, wanting the best for her, being available to her in times of need, feeling and showing kindheartedness.

All of this includes an openness to the possibility of some form of sacrifice of our own comfort for the other’s wellbeing.

We ask four assurances of love from a partner or significant other. A yes to each of these questions gives us evidence of a caring connection. Each yes can become a commitment to the building of true trust and fearless love:

Are you there for me and how?
Do you care about me and how?
Do I matter to you and how?
Are you interested in me and how?

Loving also means putting ourselves in a vulnerable position;
we show our love and hope it will be accepted. We bare our hearts and hope they will not be battered.
As love expands, it focuses on creating concord and reconciliation beyond our own relationship. Our concern may widen from interest in others’ bonding with us to caring about the harmonious bonding among all our friends or all humanity. This altruistic concern can give us a sense of contentment, as we hear Edward IV express it in Shakespeare’s Richard III:
And now in peace my soul shall part to heaven,

Since I have set my friends at peace on earth. In addition, as love expands in our lives, it becomes a force for change. When we are stirred by love to pursue a goal, we are more likely to have a successful outcome. This is because situations and people respond best to love, a gentle but powerfully appealing energy. We see this in our personal relationships. Showing patient and enduring love helps someone change more than badgering or demanding ever will.

Likewise in the political forum, an antiwar movement makes more progress when those who are passionate about peace show that they are motivated by a genuine loving care for humanity
rather than simply by their opposing stance toward a national policy. However, both in personal relationships and in political concerns, we do not use love as a strategy. That would be a form
of manipulation. We simply notice that love has a power all its own. It is redemptive, because it forgives and thereby rehabilitates. It is transformative of hearts and of how the world works. It
changes things.

Love is a force, but it is sometimes called a feeling. When we imagine that love is a feeling, we may be disappointed because we notice that we cannot keep any feeling up and running all the time. A feeling is an intense, immediate, sensate/physical experience. Feelings have a beginning, a middle, and an end; love is ongoing. Feelings are responses to specific stimuli; love is the stimulus and response at the same time. Love can be a state of being, a fond sentiment, an ongoing bond. All of these have an enduring quality. Thus, love, since it lasts beyond its instances of expression,
includes and happens with feelings rather than is one.

Love can be understood in many ways, but six descriptors stand out: Love as capacity, as quality, as commitment, as purpose, as grace, and as practice.



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