Do We (Not So) Secretly Hate Love?
The song is right. We are looking for love in all the wrong places
With the holidays upon us, I interrupt our regularly scheduled programming of tearing each other’s throats out for…love.
Yes. Love. That four-letter word. All of us could use a big heaping helping of it.
Most of us do not truly feel loved, even surrounded by our families or within a relationship. The holidays tend to magnify this sense of profound lack, which is why so many of us find this season painful instead of joyful.
Nor do we feel especially loving. We may even suspect that loving our neighbors is for chumps or dupes, even if we dare not voice that thought aloud.
And on all sides, we see (and often experience) violence, hatred, injustice, poverty, intimidation, dehumanization, pollution, tyranny. The list of problems seems to roll on forever.
The preceding can all be summed up simply as lack of love. We do not truly love ourselves, so we have no love to give anyone else.
Past time for a love break. Maybe we would even swing this love-thing into a full-time gig. Wouldn’t that be something. Better than what we have right now.
Before we get to full-time love, consider the diligent holiday hostess. This Martha Stewart twin planned a big holiday bash. Budget-minded, she did the cooking, house cleaning, and decorating herself, starting the night before party day.
By the following afternoon, she needed a break. In the hall on her way to the kitchen, she caught her reflection in a mirror. She was not at all happy with her disheveled hair, grimy clothes, and sweaty face.
She rushed to the kitchen faucet, wet a dishtowel, and returned to the mirror, swiping vigorously. She cleaned and cleaned that mirror, but it still showed her the same.
She returned armed with a vinegar solution and new towels, but her reflection did not improve even after another thorough cleansing.
Suddenly she thought, “I’ll simply change the mirror. That ought to do the trick.”
She yanked that mirror off the wall and went to the attic to look for a new one, which she hung in the old mirror’s spot. To her dismay, however, her reflection did not improve, and now had the added dust from the attic.
This simple parable makes it easy, of course, to spot her real problem. If she doesn’t like her reflection, she needs to clean herself, not switch the looking glass.
Yet when it comes to our own lives, many of us behave exactly like the hostess. We look outward and rail at the mirror’s reflection instead of inward. We point to anyone and anything but ourselves as the cause of the loneliness, pain, ill health, and general lack in our lives and ourselves.
A wise teacher named Jesus once discussed this very human tendency to look outward and fixate on others’ problems instead of looking within self to solve our own. We do this individually, in groups, and as a society.
Rarely do we realize that our bodies, our relationships (or lack thereof), our lives, and our world are simply mirrors that reflect who we really are right back to us.
Instead of ignoring the mirror’s message, what if we each changed just one thing within ourselves. What if we decided to love ourselves a little bit more by judging ourselves a little bit less?
It could happen. It has happened. And when we love ourselves more simply by judging ourselves less, we change the world for the better, too. We are all that connected, at the level of energy-consciousness.
That’s what be the change really means. It’s about our being—who we are—not our doing, or actions.
Self-love, then, and ultimately a more loving world are possible by freeing ourselves from our self-judgments. Instead of being scary or hopeless, the mirror and its reflection are part of the solution.