The concept of love is so played out. How many times a day do we hear it thrown around, and do we throw it around ourselves? I love ya, I love this coffee, celebs saying how much they love their fans, new romantic partners dropping the ‘L’ word fast and loose. We’ve even swapped and added the heart reaction over the more tepid thumbs-up ‘like’ button on different social media. And of course it’s never more fadded and padded than in the month of February, the month of love. Cue the bandwagon for cheesy slogans, special deals, and all things red hearts. What could be more cliché than talking about love, and talking about it in Valentines month! While we were clearly loath to slip into this cliché, we felt we had something to add to this conversation.
Even while building out our movement values, after much debate we opted not to include love as a value, for exactly that reason… it felt dangerously open to being experienced as lightweight, watered-down, and played out; and it comes with so much baggage for every person. After all, everyone has tens or hundreds of love stories in their lives – each with their own meaning assigned.
So how how how did we land here then, with this article talking about LOVE and in the month of love?!
Well, we realized the very soul of this movement is Love. There is just no way we could be seeking to connect, catalyze, and transform for the highest good of all without there being a deep sense of Love – Love for the seen and unseen parts of the planet, for current and future inhabitants, for our families and society, and even beyond into the stars and ether. And if Love is so strong a driving force that it can bind together strangers, abstract concepts, business and personal transformation, and generations unseen, then how exactly can it simultaneously be seen as played out and light-weight. Surely these two states cannot co-exist?…
And it’s here that we began thinking in what philosophers sometimes reference as capitals and smalls. This is the idea that Love in its most eternal and transcendent form (represented with an uppercase L), actually denotes something significantly more than the love we refer to in everyday vocabulary (represented in lower case ‘l’). For the most part, our everyday thoughts, words, and behaviors around love are in fact a limited, often distorted perspective of the bigger all pervasive Love. It is the limited version that’s mostly over-used and underwhelming.
So what would it mean to expand from love to Love in important areas of our lives? Well before we get there we need to consider what our current limitations are exactly. For example, it’s interesting that despite the rise of unconditional love in the zeitgeist, so much of the way we think and behave completely counters this idea. While we see love as deep care, affection, attention, and attraction, we often become overly-enamored with those elements and not the Love itself. So we’re quick to allow conditions to affect what we’d call love and to extend or withdraw our affections at will. Why is this?
- First, the many variables listed (attention, affection, attraction) are just that…variable. For example, even in the closest biological relationship of parent-to-child, we see so many examples of estranged parents and children where one or the other’s words or behavior could cause disowning. And of course in the case of romantic partnerships, we see that partners can easily ‘fall out of love’ with each other and even turn to harm or toxicity. So can this be real, eternal, transcendent Love, if its variability and fragility is always a threat to its survival? If the conditions make it susceptible to obsoletion?
- Second, is the concept of otherness. When we think of love as that affection, attention, and care from one to the other, it gives it the property of something that can be extended and withdrawn at will (even if with difficulty). It is something of “mine” that I give to “you” because you’ve earned it or I believe you are deserving, and is therefore something I can withdraw when I, for example, no longer find you deserving.
Now it’s not that these mainstream views of love are wrong… it is that they are exactly as we’ve stated, limited, and thus limitations on the fullness of real Love.
So here today in this most ‘loved-up’ time of the year, we offer a broader definition to love. One that itself is reductive (as all words are) and yet offers a map towards that bigger bolder more real Love.
The fundamental newness we would add is:
- The way we apply deep care must be elevated to being immovable, unchangeable by the sensitivity of conditions. And perhaps even aspire to being anti-fragile.
- And to reach even higher, at the core of transcendent Love is the essence of Oneness. It is the deepest Knowing that the ‘other’ is really no other. They are an extension of the self, a unique expression of the unified whole that we are both / all a part of. In other words, we are parts of the same Whole. When we shift our perspective towards seeing Love as this extension of self, we can frame everything we expect in that way of simply wanting the best for the receiver of our Love.
If we accept this as a new and greater definition of love, are we saying that we should accept toxicity, poor treatment, or disobedience in relationships? This is definitely not the case. This is where the variability of affection, attention and attraction come in. Love can exist irrespective of the degree of these variables. When we truly and deeply Love another, we can champion them from close or afar, intend the very best for them, and revel in them finding joy because the Love we have for them is not dependent on the condition of the role they play in our lives.
By seeing them through the perspective of Oneness, we can love them deeply as we would love our Selves while choosing to withdraw our attention or physical presence from the parts that no longer serve us. Just as with ourselves, there are parts we learn to let go of when they no longer serve us and we can do so without condemning ourselves, so too can we allow for the variables to vary, without it changing the Love we hold for the receiver.
Real Love is eternal; therefore indestructible and ever-expanding. To love in the capital Love way means not just being resilient in love but antifragile.
