Sitting on the receiving end of love is the easiest thing in the world to do. Loving unconditionally, however is the most difficult thing to do, consistently. I’m not talking about “easy love”. Easy love is our love for kids, spouse, friends and family. We love our kids. Why not? They start out so darn cute and cuddly that we become devoted to their happiness and well being from start to finish. We love the spouse. Again, big deal. Why not love the person whose fate is inextricably tied to your own. Marital love/romantic love comes with music to inspire, books to instruct and movies to motivate. Marital love has a long, built in learning curve to boost its success. Familial relationships and friendships also fall into the “easy love” category. Easy love is wonderful, but there is so much more required of us.
The amount of information available to help us optimize easy love is inexhaustible, but what of universal love? Isn’t that where we fail? Universal love is extended to those we don’t know. Its motive is the greater good. It means respecting all of humanity, not just the part that loves us back or appeals on a personal level. It deserves so much more effort than we give it, because it can transform the world. Universal love doesn’t revolve around self. Maybe that’s why it isn’t very popular?
Universal love is easy to manufacture, but we withhold it like misers. Hoarding love shouldn’t be a thing, but it is. Miserly withholding of love diminishes it, rather than preserves it. How do we change?
The first step is to stop elevating perception of a group over the reality of the individual. People tend to have the same basic needs and desires: beyond that each person is uniquely made. Show interest in the uniqueness of every person you encounter, and you’ll find his story. Knowing a person’s story fosters understanding and connection, which are essential components for love. Approval often follows on the heels of the understanding and connection, but not always. The good news is that approval is not necessary for love.
Universal love requires operating with a motive that doesn’t factor in self interest. We must stop thinking of people as a mass of sameness, ascribing values to them based on some malformed impression about *one of the categories they fall in to. If we refuse to see a person’s individuality, we can’t claim to love them.
Why care about “universal love”? Our country is experiencing profound upheaval. I believe it’s our lack of love that’s brought us here. We have a collective case of self interest on steroids, and it has bred disconnection and division. We’ve gone to our separate corners to care only about those issues that personally affect us, to the exclusion and detriment of issues that other Americans are facing. If only for pragmatic reasons, we need to seek each other’s perspective and solve our problems with compassion/love. This approach will bring new solutions to issues like immigration reform, racism, education reform…not to mention everyone’s favorite whipping dog, The Affordable Care Act! Lately, the attitude has been, I don’t care if your home burns down as long as mine is okay. Guess what? That doesn’t work, because we live in an apartment building. Sooner or later, my crisis will become your crisis.
* We aren’t just a function of the nationality, gender or religious category we fall into. We can claim membership to dozens of categories.
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