Love Indeed Moves the World
What an amazing article I came across by Savala Norton. Here is one of my favorite excerpts from the piece:
If I leave you with anything today, I hope it is the sense that your work in courtrooms, at negotiating tables, in legislatures, beside clients, and writing on your laptop can be — and in my view should be — a pronouncement, assertion, and feat of love. Love as the conscious choice to extend yourself — perhaps to give something up — so that someone else may flourish.
Our whole lives can be made up of acts of love. Extending ourselves for the benefit of others in our families, friendships and other relationships, personal endeavors, professional lives, and numerous other domains can show love in countless forms reaching fruition. This includes us giving our best selves in professional roles, whether as a teacher, lawyer, doctor, nurse, or countless other occupations. This also includes us striving to be the best we can be in each of our countless relationships we hold. How can we be the best spouses, parents, siblings, children, friends, and so on? How can we offer charity and love to our neighbor or even a stranger asking for just a little of our time and resources? How can we best serve our fellow humans in our communities, countries, and greater world through sharing of time, gifts, resources, or even warm thoughts and prayers?
One of the greatest realizations for me in the past few years has been learning just how much we are all connected in unity and love. No matter what our background, past, or previous mistakes, each of us has tens of thousands of people we encounter on our journeys. Many of these people we encounter touch us in immeasurable ways and vice versa. One recent example of this came last January during a very trying time for both my wife and me. We had been visiting my wife’s family in the small community they lived. Of course, winter had come back to Iowa in full force — snow, ice, bare trees and shrubs, and near-zero Farenheit temperatures. On our way home, we unfortunately got a flat tire. I called roadside assistance, and my wife and I waited in the car for about 45 minutes for a mechanic to come. During that time as the car kept us warm, two different families came out of their warm homes to ask if we needed help. When the tow-truck finally came, it was none other than the dad of one of my high-school classmates. We shared some funny jokes and got caught up, and I was on the road with my spare tire in no time! I was sure to give my high-school friend’s dad a five-star review online. And the next time they saw my parents in the town I grew up in, they recounted the story of helping “one of the nicest guys you could ever find.”
Yes, acts of kindness, service, charity, care, and love are what make the world go round. But these acts often seem to be in short supply and profoundly high demand. Sadly, you never know what hardships someone is facing. And you never have any idea what toxic or dark elements might be infecting someone’s deeper life and vision that influence them to commit unimaginably hurtful misdeeds. People’s intentions are not always golden and their actions not always good. All the more reason to extend ourselves as much as we can to benefit others — to constantly extends acts of love. These acts send a little light out to the whole world.
During our everyday lives, we may not always directly see the fruits of our efforts. Others may not see or recognize the great strides we make to offer acts of love and help make the world a better place. Some may have so many flies swarming around them from past mistakes or tragic misperceptions that they are not often given a second glance to even be seen for their genuinely beautiful and wonderful deeper selves. But the inexplicably wonderful thing is that we ourselves(and perhaps some other people who know us best) can always be happy with the goodness we spread and our own silent and nameless acts of kindness and love. Another essential piece here is self-love and self-care. We need to love ourselves and treat ourselves as we would our best friend for numerous reasons. When we care for ourselves, our mental and physical health is better. And then we are able to better share our love and care for others.
A final note on one of the tougher parts of Norton’s challenge — love can sometimes mean giving something up so that someone else may flourish. Sometimes, we have to give up something so near and dear to us it may seem like the mountaineer who had to cut off his arm caught in a boulder in order to survive(the film 127 hours is based on real-life mountaineer Aron Ralston’s epic survival story of such critical actions). Sometimes, out of love and care for a dear friend or family member(as well as our own self-love and self-care), we may have to practice a certain amount of detachment from the relationship to regard the well-being of all involved. Relationships that have become encumbered by too many toxic elements to be healthy for anyone call for such tough love. Why must a married couple stay together if they are constantly bickering and creating an unhappy home life for their children? How can staying friends with someone who constantly judges or berates us be a positive choice in any way? Even if a toxic work environment provides us with income for basic needs, will it not do more harm to our physical or mental well-being to stay in such deleterious conditions for the long-term?
But like Aron Ralston was able to survive by cutting off his own arm and making a 100 foot descent down a Utah canyon to a family of hikers below, those acts of detachment that seem brutal do often indeed bring more positive results than bad. New types of relationships can form from another type gone sour. Spouses in an unhappy marriage may find a divorce allows them to cooperate better as coparents or friends. A broken friendship can help each individual to take hard lessons into new relationships and even become a better person overall. Even unavoidable estrangements between family members or confidantes might allow each side to better revere the sacred bonds of deeper unity and love that endure in families — as with all humanity — than if they were to keep going up and down on a tumultous roller-coaster of dysfunction. The greatest acts of care and love often must be so tough like the lyrics to a pop song: “and I love you enough to let you go.” It is never a permanent goodbye, perhaps, but a letting go of a dear one into love itself until love brings them back to us again when the time is right.
