THE CHAPTERS: life lessons

chapter 2

 ଘ(੭ˊᵕˋ)੭* ੈ

love

Love, that thing we have great difficulty even describing, is the only truly real and lasting experience of life. It is the opposite of fear, the essence of relationships, the core of creativity, the grace of power, an intricate part of who we are. It is the source of happiness, the energy that connects us and that lives within us.

Love has nothing to do with knowledge, education, or power; it is beyond behavior. It is also the only gift in life that is not lost. Ultmately, it is the only thing we can really give. In a world of illusions, a world of dreams and emptiness, love is the source of truth.

For all its power and grandness, however, it is elusive. Some spend their lives searching for love. We are afraid we will never have it, that if we find it, we will lose it or take it for granted, fearing it will not last.

We think we know what love looks like, since we formed pictures of it during child- hood. The most common picture is the roman- tic ideal: when we meet that someone special, we suddenly feel whole, everything is won- derful, and we live happily ever after. Of course, we are brokenhearted when, in real life, we have to fill in the not-so-romantic details, when we find out that most of the love we give and receive is conditional. Even the love for and from our families and friends is based on expectations and conditions. Inevitably, these expectations and conditions are not met, and the details of real life become the thread that creates a nightmare. We find ourselves in loveless friendships and relation- ships. We wake from our romantic illusions to a world that lacks the love we had hoped for as children. Now talung an adult view of love, we see it all clearly, realistically, and bitterly.

Fortunately, true love is possible, we can feel the love we had hoped for. It does exist, but not in our approach to love. It does not live in the dream of finding the perfect mate or the best friend. The wholeness we seek lives here, with and within us, now, in reality. We have only to remember.

Most of us want unconditional love, love that exists because of who we are rather than what we do or do not do. If we are lucky, very lucky, we may have experienced a few minutes of it in our lifetimes. Sadly, most of the love we experience in this life is very conditional. We're loved because of what we do for others, how much we earn, how funny we are, how we treat our children or keep our houses, and so on. We find it hard to love people just the way they are. It's almost as if we look for excuses not to love others.

We can only find peace and happiness in love when we release the conditions we place on our love for each other. And we usually place the toughest conditions on those we love the most. We have been taught conditional love well--we have literally been conditioned- which makes this a difficult unlearning process. As human beings, it is not possible to find complete unconditional love with one another, but we can find more than just the minutes we usually get in a lifetime.

One of the few places we do find unconditional love is from our children when they are very young. They don't care about our day, our money, or our accomplishments. They just love us. We eventually teach them to put conditions on their love as we reward them for smiling, getting good grades, and being what we want them to be. But we can still learn a lot from the way children love us. If we loved our children just a little more unconditionally, for a little while longer, we might create a very different world to live in.

Conditions on love are weights on our relationships. When we release the conditions, we can find love in many ways we never thought possible.

One of the greatest obstacles to giving unconditional love is our fear that the love may not be returned. We don't realize that the feeling we seek lies in the giving, not in the receiving.