Everyone is looking for love. Everyone wants to find love and that special person who will complete them, romantic or otherwise.
Finding love today has become a business. People feel that the more applications they put in, the sooner their quest will bear result. The individual and social pressures on the need to find love are overwhelming. They compel many people to undertake rigorous, tiring, intellectual and calculated process to find love.
In this rush, most people tend to forget that love, like peace, is a subtle feeling that emerges internally. It is in us. It is unconditional. But it can be lost in chaos. Love is silent and certain. But it is an instinct that can’t be sought after and won’t emerge in weakness. Love can’t complete you. You have to be complete to find and feel love.
Unfortunately many people today are trying to find love to feel better about themselves. Looking outwardly to resolve something internal is weakness. Those that find love as a part of this process may not be finding love after all.
What they find is a logical source that will placate certain requirements in them. Eventually, they will grow tired of this substitute. This dissatisfaction and the 'lack of love' will begin to bread negativities in relationships such as, physical violence, hatred, substance abuse, extra-marital affairs, child abuse, depression, sleeplessness, etc.
Even then people don't walk away from these relationships. They stay in them because they are afraid to be alone, to be loveless, or have been taught to ‘stick on for the purpose of love’. This ‘sticking on’ will lead people to believe that they fallen deeper in love or are high human beings for putting up with trauma, torture and self-defecation.
All this is not love. They are all choices made to fill needs. Needs that actually should have been filled by the SELF.
Why in our societies are self-love and self-satisfaction considered to be selfish? Why is the role of self-love undermined to such a high degree? Why is self-love considered to be so meaningless?
As a result, for those embarking on this journey, the quest for self-love seems difficult and confusing. Taking the time out to discover self-love seems irrelevant, trivial and dissatisfying, especially when compared to the prospect of having a spouse, children, dogs and that white house with picket fences.
But who creates that warmth in that picturesque image. And what happens to that image when there is no warmth in it? What happens to the children when their mother thrashes them, their parents beat each other or the children get abused?
Where does that warmth come from? It does not come from children, the spouse or the house. It comes from the self. It has to be there before the marriage occurs, the house is bought and the children are born. And if self-love came before all of these things, then finding love today would never be a business.
Yes, many children like me, have had loveless childhoods. But does that give us the right to carry forth the cycle of violence or, does it vest us with the responsibility of discovering love within us and spreading it, nonetheless?
