Maybe love is too strong a word for our daily lives. Love your neighbor, love all people, love yourself. Maybe it’s just too difficult for our cluttered personalities, too hard of a concept to assimilate against all of the distractions we must deal with on a daily basis. Maybe we should just start with “like.” It’s easier to like someone or at least distinguish between like and dislike. Both parties in any relationship or confrontation could initially know where they stand. And it would be easier to come to terms with dislike of a person if we were able to sublimate this feeling into a gray area just before like. In other words, hide dislike and fake like. It is at least a starting point for a relationship that would have absolutely no chance to survive otherwise. “I dislike you” could be your inner feeling with “I like you” on the surface. Again, at least this could be a starting point toward the concept of love.
Love is a difficult concept. We are told to love but not how or what it is or even how it is supposed to work. There is no user manual. Our parents, teachers, ministers, etc., all tell us to love others, even unconditionally, but do they, themselves, really understand the concept of loving someone? It is much easier to love “some-thing” like a dog or a cat or your car or house, etc., but isn’t this just a stronger “like?” It is not always possible to distinguish between these concepts.
Maybe we should first teach like and dislike and then gradually assimilate the concepts that reside in love; go from known to unknown. Then, if our parents, teachers, ministers, etc., understand this transition themselves, they might be able to transmit the basic concept of love by example, by actually living it. In this way we would be dealing with reality, not just words or preaching or two dimensional thinking. Then, finally we might begin to distinguish between real love and mere sexual attraction which really muddies the waters.
Our concept of love is mostly lacking emotion and feeling which relegates it to just words with different moods. Sexual love is a much more ubiquitous feeling that is charged with emotion and feelings of warmth and attraction to another or others. Does this equate or even relate to loving your neighbor, pets, car, etc.? Definitely not! These two concepts are in two different ballparks and exist for different reasons. So where does this leave us?
In my opinion we are all the way back to like and dislike which are easy to understand, easy to teach and easy to transmit to others. And this makes it possible to lay the foundation and groundwork for a true understanding of love with its emotional magnetism. This could create a whole movement about loving your neighbor and people who are different and even lead eventually to world peace. All of these could have some accessible and realistic, useful and understandable meaning. And so all of our most popular songs which are drummed into our consciousness and even subconscious would be easier to categorize. “All You Need is Love,” “Love is the Answer,” and many other pop songs can convey physical attraction, but maybe our society could relate to all of its members with a realistic “like” or even start with just tolerance.
By understanding the basic concepts of like and love maybe we could establish real feelings for our fellow humans and start a real and realistic movement toward a true world peace. Maybe. Let’s start with the basics. Think kindness…!