Happiness and our capacity for love
What is our capacity for love I ask you? And within that one question are perhaps two? One is related to our capacity to receive and one in our capacity to give. I would suggest the two are related and entangled, perhaps reflecting the way we make love.
For now let us somewhat put aside our capacity to receive, yet to note that it does and will effect our capacity to give. And thus in the final analysis as we can not do the work internally for others all we have any power over ultimately is our own journey within. Cultivating our own awareness and experience of self love is surely a prerequisite for what we can give.
The question of what is my capacity to love comes I notice as a desire to let out, to open my being, my gifts, generosity without a view set on personal gain. For each the motivation will be different, for me I see it stemming from two places. One is reflecting on all the country’s I’ve been in and all those years and in this country included, all the people who have been kind to me and helped me often many miles from home.
The other is in my dying, in the awareness of my priority of values whilst in life. So much of what we do it seems to me is to squabble about the small things, the petty, scratching those low irritated feelings day to day. It’s in the online arguments that barely resolve anything but take up our time. It’s in the reading the news and getting angry. It’s in the negative judgments of others and how they don’t individually do what we approve of, looking down as though we are higher up.
At the other end of the arc there’s the experience of depth, true supporting and caring, connection and ultimately love, between friends or especially to strangers. What other word do we have better to describe that feeling, that camaraderie, that sense of helping someone along, as we all travel this journey of life together.
How different it feels to the smallness of the feeling when we get lost in the weeds of living, blaming others, falling out.
And if it’s in six months or a hundred years we will arrive at the same end. So what I wonder is our capacity to explore and find something of real depth before that arrives?
Well I can feel that desire in me, that current of knowing that I want to spend time doing the important, the rich, instead of frittering away time in the shallows. Yet once the desire has been recognised the next question is how?
Perhaps it’s in what you create, the gifts of your heart in a way. I can feel in me there’s much further I can go, many more I can reach and my desire to support and connect. I know I’ve a much greater capacity to love than that I currently reach.
In sessions with clients and in groups I can feel it coming closer. I can feel the centredness and the willingness to put aside myself for a while, my ego and to live to support others. I can feel myself closer to myself when I stop thinking of myself first. Is that a strange thing to hear? It feels like there is paradox in there. Maybe the giving and the receiving are truly so connected and entangled they reflect just that?
I think of Palestinians as well as struggling people here and how other people can treat them so appallingly and how doing so can not on a deeper level possibly feel good. I feel the hurt and bitterness of the inflicters is blocking their capacity to love. And the pain they inflict on others pushes those others to emotionally retract. One is hurt and the other is hurt as a result, which draws them further apart, not a closer connection of people who of course have equal hearts.
The circle is so unwise, yet what of ourselves? It’s hard for us to get a clear perspective sometimes of what we are feeling hurt from. It can be hard for us to see what is holding back our own capacity to love? So much of what we have felt hurt from is buried in our past and so few are happy to explore what’s there under the rubble. It’s so easy for us to close down our own inner searching and our reaching out. Yet we know the more we uncover and let out to others the more it feels good to ourselves.
Unless we are wise in our thinking and brave enough to go looking, we all loose when we shrink our capacity to love.