People say love makes the world go round. That indeed seems to be the case, except that it is not the right kind of love but a misconception of love. It is a pity, because love is the most natural of emotions and all of us felt its joy some time or the other.
Let us consider the common ways we understand love today. Probably the most common one is romantic love, which is a strong attraction or attachment to another person. Though romantic love is depicted as holding the interests of the other above one’s own, often the opposite is the case. It frequently means attachment, pleasure seeking, possessiveness, jealousy and fear of loss. Give-and-take relationships are an integral part of our lives, but it is wrong to equate them with love. ‘I cannot live without you’ is the most common expression of romantic love, which is also the clearest proclamation of dependence and loneliness. Can a relationship full of such negative emotions be truly associated with love?
Parental love arguably is closer to true love, particularly that of a mother for her young. But even parental love is heavily laced with expectations today. There is attachment and possessiveness (and the associated fear of missing) in parent-child relationships. Children are imprinted with the ideas of comparison and competition right from early childhood and it is not uncommon for many parents to treat their children as instruments for fulfilling their own unmet ambitions and aspirations.
Then there is the love that goes beyond a person – love of a nation and love of a culture, heritage, religion or race. This is probably the cause behind most wars in the history of the world as the love of a nation eventually leads to the hatred or resentment of others. Love of a religion, race or culture has provided the motive, time after time, for a person to pick up an assault weapon and shoot scores of innocent children. Can this ever be called love?
How about love of our work? We are all enjoined to do work that we love and love the work we do. But what is the reality? We are always chasing the next pay hike, next promotion, next honor/award and are constantly switching from one workplace to another. Our work life is often a rat race with different degrees of ambition, competition, greed and jealousy. Where is love in all this?
It is a pity that we associate all these transactional activities with love as they distort the very meaning of this precious word. All these actions foster division and hence conflict. With such actions, the happiness that we seek through love is never attained or is fleeting at best.
What is love then? To understand true love, we need to delve into some of our past actions, which carried no motive – either reward or punishment (thankfully, all of us have at least a few of them in our lives). Don’t we remember getting lost in an activity or experience with no sense of self or the other? They are actions carried out for their own sake and without any expectations. They are moments spent completely absorbed in the activity and it is only later that we recall them as joyful.
True love must unite and not divide. It is a state of absolute and total attention. It is saying ‘yes’ to everything that life dishes out. An act of true love is spontaneous and is not trying to live up to an ideal or a concept. It just spills forth from the depths of one’s heart with no purposive calculations of ‘what’s in it for me’. When you have love in your heart there is simply no room for any negative emotion as it brings forth nothing but joy. All action will be right action when it stems from true love. This is the kind of love that should be making the world go round.
Ravee Chittoor is an associate professor at the University of Victoria. The views he expresses are personal.
You can read more articles on our interfaith blog, Spiritually Speaking, HERE /blogs/spiritually-speaking
