Let’s be very honest with each other here. Fundamentally, at the core of your being, what you are seeking is to feel like you are “enough.” If you need a moment to ponder that, please, go ahead.
Fundamentally, most fundamentally, what just about every single person on this earth is seeking, is the same thing you are seeking.
“I am enough.”
To be enough, then, you have to keep growing, whether that it is in work, in relationships, or in both how you, and the outside world, view you. As Bob Dylan's 1965 masterpiece, It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), put it: "He not busy being born is busy dying."
Then at certain points over the course of life, you may start to feel like you have enough financially and stop seeking more, or you are enough socially and stop attending the important events on the social calendar, or “your” partner is enough and you stop searching elsewhere. Or, you may resign to the feeling that… well, this is all I’m capable of… which may or may not be true, yet since you’ve come to believe it, it will take hold into your mind and spirit. I do promise you though, you will find new places to cultivate that feeling of “being enough.” Yet, from this perspective of perceiving and approaching life, it will never be enough.
Ultimately, love is the only way one grows, and love is the only way one is fully alive.
Every moment of separation from love, is a separation from life itself.
What are the alternatives to love? I’m not writing just about the love between a man and a woman here, I mean it in the broader sense of deep connection and presence. And there is really only one alternative. That is, to play the game of life.
The game of life is tension. It is romance. It is power. It is the homeless child on the street, and the billionaire financier in his Mercedes Maybach.
Penelope Cruz goes about this way in Vicky Cristina Barcelona: “Our love, our love will last forever. It's forever. But, it just doesn't work. That's why it will always be romantic. Because, it cannot be complete.”
The game of life is duality and desire. Self improvement seminars and bio hacks. It is in the perpetual motion of … never … being … enough.
Without the game of life, we wouldn’t exist, because, well, we are participants in it. So we have to play the game. And as long as we exist in this game, we want to improve. But the game is not all there is, and playing the game, in the way we are commonly taught, is the not the only means to improve. Every moment of separation from love, is a separation from life itself. The more we play the game, become absorbed in it, the more our experience of life becomes unfulfilled. There is a longing. A longing for a space that is and always will be there, yet a space we have lost contact with, forgotten how to touch and be touched by. Neglected.
The game of life is priorities and hierarchy. Priorities mean more time to this activity and that person, and less energy to that which is deemed less important.
Love, honest love, is timeless. There is no sense of time, it is just a happening. And limits and boundaries are ephemeral. All is connected in the most delicate and miraculous way.
Here I propose an inversion of your approach to your life, the approach you may endow your kids with, one day. Ground yourself in the universe of love, first. Become so stable in it, cultivate the ways in which you find it, so that whatever vicissitudes may come at you as you progress through the game of life, you always have the equilibrium of love to return to. Then, and only then, do you start to tackle the game of life, to play games of power and desire, to tolerate respect from others and give them the same, to rise up the ladders of success and contribution that may tickle your fancy, and to enjoy a life well lived. Because while the games we invent in the game of life often serve ad distractions from the tension of existence, play in the universe of love is pure, unaltered joy. So, let love be the space you come home to, and often. Love as the highest priority.
The reality of this journey of consciousness is that what we focus our mind on, tends to improve. Some people improve at some things more than others, yet what we give time and energy to, improves. Give more time and energy to holding the space of love, honest love, and it will expand for you. Give more focus to being a master of the world of deal-making and high finance, and you will become better at it. Spend more time playing football with your child, and you will deepen your connection with them in that way. It is, of course, not a one way street. You will only improve over time, if you value constructive feedback, are honest with yourself, and proactively find ways to improve and breakthrough to new ground when the going is tough.
Just like the game of life, love is challenging.
There may usually be a spark which ignites it, yet it will first and foremost evolve through understanding. Understanding and joy.
If you don’t understand the one you love, you will clash. If you don’t seek to continually understand the one you love, you will eventually atrophy and disconnect. And if the joys of connection are seldom nourished, the spark will wither.
What challenge, loss, failure, rejection do on a psychological level is to make us viscerally experience that there is something missing. Like there is a hole inside of us. Like we are not enough. And people tend to fill that hole in different ways. Some push and try harder. Some avoid it. Some attempt to fill the pain with more pain (for instance, in the form of alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, or self harm). Some, and this is when we inhabit love territory, accept it for what it is, surrender to a lack of understanding or ability or resources (whatever the lack is), and then reflect on how it can be improved and go about making that happen, if it is important. They also give themselves the time to let the energy of that initial (negative) visceral reaction melt away (this part is very important, because energy tends to permeate longer than our conscious mind can perceive). The game of life approach, on the other hand, is to equally absorb and resist the lack, to seek to rise above it, to win. With this approach, anger, fear, insecurity, all these negative associations that the mind generates when it deals with “lack of”, become ingrained in us, serving as fuel. However this kind of fuel gradually takes you into murky waters further away from the space of love, so it becomes harder and harder to make your way back.
Today, we are living in a world that is riding on the coattails of the Enlightenment, yet going too far into the realm of the abstract game of life. And it’s about time to learn how to make our way back into the universe of love. How do we go about doing this?
The universe of love incorporates everything that is directly human and that is real. By contrast, the game of life tends to deal with matters that are the by-product of human thought.
Here at aware, we believe in cultivating a connection with what makes us fundamentally human. Food, body, breath and mind (for example, see here, here, here, and here, respectively for each). But that’s not necessarily all there is to it. Spend time with a child that has yet to be inculcated with social norms and the perils of thought, and it will pull you into its orbit of love (be careful not to introduce them into the world of society, too soon, by the way). Sit on the beach and simply listen to the sound of the waves, music free, cigarette free, alcohol free, simply talking and being with a friend, a lover, a stranger (by the way, in the universe of love, there are no strangers, we are all connected). Those are personal, individual means. We can also come back to love in the connected space of our relationships. Where are you feeling divided with your partner? How can you reconcile the differences and connect, together, once again? Beyond ourselves and our interpersonal relationships, there is also the connection we cultivate to nature and the rest of the living world. These are all ways in which we connect to the space of love, and there are many, many others, and the more often we practice them, and the more diversity we bring to our practice, the more stable and resilient our connection grows over time. Love enjoys knowing everything about you. Desire (and power) need mystery. Remember, in the space of love, there is no urge to control, only surrender and trust.
Both the game of life and the universe of love ask for us to trust. Trust is an imperative in how these worlds function. However, in the way the geme of life operates, we trust the in-built structures that filter people based upon their (often) measurable qualities, while in matters of love, we must surrender trust blindly to the universe and what it is offering us today. I’m proposing that over the course of your life, you cultivate both ways of trusting. Surrender and control. Certainty and uncertainty. Over time, you will come to notice that different matching processes (society, algorithms, and the universe) foster different kinds of relationships and opportunities.
The thing is that, fundamentally, data is binary, while love is singular. For all the decisions you make, and succeed at, which improve your quality and rating in the game of life, it will never be enough. It is only the time you spend existing in the universe of love that the search ceases. When you invert the priorities, when you truly trust you can come back to love and everything it asks of you, your experience in the game of life ceases to be rational quest for more, and simply a joy in the experience, a joy in the challenge, a joy in the struggle. Where the game of life is a fragmented series of wins and losses, the universe of love is a connected continuity.
We can’t spend all of our time in the infinite space of love. We have to live too, amongst people and amongst the natural world. We have to impose some limits on our lives, and on the world and people around us. We need some normality and certainty in particular areas so we retain the energy to deal with the uncertainty in others. And getting things done involves reconciling the demands of diverse interests. Life is more enjoyable if we spend more time doing things of interest to us (though not necessarily easy things!), with people whom we want to be with, and in order to have access to these activities, people and places, we have to become good at reconciling the complex demands of society. We have to be able to find a way to earn money, which is the currency of society and allows us the space and opportunity to operate within it with greater degrees of freedom. We have to navigate the need for power, the competition, the different desires at different moments in time, and so on. So go and do all those things! And become good at them too! Just keep your perspective and grounding of the whole universe of life, and continue to develop an elastic, open mind that can move between the two alternatives of our human experience. To play the game of life, well, and to love, honestly and purely.
Finally, imagine you have a human that has just about seen all there is to see, and they have the means to have almost all there is to have. In other words, their desires are mostly satiated. What can you give to this human? Loving presence. As they move through life, the most valuable, and enduring, quality they appreciate, is presence from another human. Now, imagine that you are with someone, anyone, a friend, a lover, a family member, and you see and feel them as complete. What can you give to this human? Loving presence. The longer you can sustain this loving presence, the more whole they will become.
I loved the distinction you draw between love asking for understanding and power operating on mystery, and the importance of surrender for that to happen. Easier said than done, but a healthy reminder.