Here I am a quarter of the year already gone. It isn't imperative this fitted neatly into 12 months, but it helps me to have a frame and 'a year of living in love with the world' sounded more manageable than a lifetime. At least to start with.
Loving people, strangers, colleagues, neighbours, friends and family is both incredibly difficult and easy. I am finding it much easier to love strangers, because strangers lack the detail of closeup, the nitty gritty of familiarity which can erode kindness quicker than almost anything. It's relatively easy to walk around thinking 'I love you' as people walk past in the street, but much more difficult to think lovingly towards someone you see and know and talk to and depend on and are bound to day in day out. I am astonished at the rewards of being more loving to people at work. Sometimes these people irritate or mystify me or make my life harder or make me feel bad, but that is the human condition not them as individuals. I am trying and trying and sometimes it works to stop and think before reacting, to love them or more precisely to try to "see" them, to understand what they might mean or want or be afraid of in that moment they seem to be difficult, and work has become a great deal more pleasant as a result.
I don't think I'm any closer to reaching a new plateau. More often it's as if I'm in a maze -- and isn't life a maze really, when it all comes down, just a series of paths taken or not, the walls sometimes closing in and sometimes opening out into clearings, the sense of there being a destination but having no idea what or where it is, of running, walking, crawling along paths which feel sometimes like someone else's paths, of decisions, of backtracking, of looking upwards and seeing the sky and hoping you'll find the point of it all before the sky becomes dark.
That sounds as if life is lived in a panic or a daze and that's not quite right either. I dont feel panicked or frightened or defeated, but I do wonder if I'm doing it right.
I was reading Maria Popova's blog (which is great, by the way) on love:
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/28/love-2-0-barbara-fredrickson/
- this post is about a book by psychologist Barbara Fredrickson's book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become (UK; public library).
and on that page, this leapt out at me:
I hope this comes out big enough to read...but if it doesn't, here it is transcribed:
First and foremost, love is an emotion, a momentary state that arises to infuse your mind and body alike. Love, like all emotions, surfaces like a distinct and fast-moving weather pattern, a subtle and ever-shifting force. As for all positive emotions, the inner feeling love brings you is inherently and exquisitely pleasant — it feels extraordinarily good, the way a long, cool drink of water feels when you’re parched on a hot day. Yet far beyond feeling good, a micro-moment of love, like other positive emotions, literally changes your mind. It expands your awareness of your surroundings, even your sense of self. The boundaries between you and not-you — what lies beyond your skin — relax and become more permeable. While infused with love you see fewer distinctions between you and others. Indeed, your ability to see others — really see them, wholeheartedly — springs open. Love can even give you a palpable sense of oneness and connection, a transcendence that makes you feel part of something far larger than yourself.
And it's true love in all its forms is akin to an ever-shifting, never fixed weather pattern, the winds of time, storms, rain, the warmth of sun. Also, that love bestows transcendence, a sense of largesse. It is hard, it is without significant milestones to help light the way or signpost through the maze, but it is what I'm aiming for.
