Love - A World Without It

LifeTalk Love – A World Without It “Love is the essence of our humanity expressing itself in actions of sacrifice so profound that we risk not surviving those expressions.” Complacency is a tragic hallmark of our lives. We’ve certainly got bunches of it. In fact, as the old saying goes, we’ve got it “in spades.” Complacency is conceived in the bosom of familiarity, where something becomes so commonplace that we errantly render it as ‘common.’ We’ve yet to beat this tendency that we have to assume that the more we have of something, the less it’s inherent value. And so we end up taking great things, important things, even critical things for granted. And it’s at that point that we begin to lose the very things that we can’t live without because we become complacent. Diluting of Love One of the things that we become complacent about is love. We blithely toss around the idea of love in a manner that paints it as something of a magical storyline. It seems that far too often we’ve relegated it to the penmanship of misty-eyed novelists or the musings of our own minds, and in doing so we seem to have created some horribly diluted understanding of love. We’ve penned that anemic kind of live into a million cards, and we’ve inserted that self-same prose into tens of thousands of chapters that lay nestled between the covers of a thousand novels. We’ve got songs, and movies, and plays, and poetry, and t-shirts, and a thousand different sayings that expound on this diluted and pathetic kind of love that we’ve manufactured. Yet, we’d be wise to ask, “Is this love?” “Really?” I don’t think so. Losing Love to Understand Love If we want to appreciate something in earnest, it seems that we must first lose it. There’s something at the basest core of our humanity that doesn’t wake up until that part of our humanity is violently shaken. And often that violent ‘shaking’ is to lose the very thing that we need to be awakened to. Therefore, maybe the best way to understand love is to understand what life would be like without it. And so, what would we lose if love didn’t exist? If it was suddenly gone? Loss of Community Take away love and we have no reason to consider our fellowman nor join him in the partnership of life and living. The sense of community that’s forged strong by empathy, fired by sympathy, and cinched tight by respect would be obliterated. The strength of community as sustained by things like conscience, and ethics, and morals, and compassion, would collapse and completely implode. Without love our communities would disintegrate, civil society would be obliterated, and the world (which is built on community) would collapse. Without love we would lose community. Well, what else would we lose if love didn’t exist? Loss of Self Take away love and our own individual existence would fall into abject irrelevance. The desire to sustain ourselves would devolve to a singularly primitive savagery that would be completely dependent upon the degree of savagery that we possess to sustain our lives. We’d have no passion for living. No sense of worth or value. No sense of purpose or meaning. Hatred ‘of’ self and ‘for’ self born of the absence of love would cause us to turn on ourselves and likely destroy ourselves out of some sense that we don’t have enough value to maintain our existence in the first place. In essence, to become loveless is to undermine our own existence and any rationale for that existence. What else would we lose if love didn’t exist? Loss of Meaning Take away love, and nothing would capture our imagination. We would find nothing compelling. We would never marvel at anything. We’d never be held in the mesmerizing embrace of wonder. We would never be lifted to heights of ecstasy, nor would we know the depths to which one could fall. Passion, desires, dreams, vision, purpose, and hope are all borne of love and entirely sustained by it. And when those things are gone (because love is gone) we become little more than mindless carbon-based life forms driven by a drive to exist that is no deeper than the drive to exist. Take away love and we take away meaning. And try to imagine a meaningless existence? What else would we lose if love didn’t exist? Loss of Existence Finally, have we postulated that without love existence would never have existed in the first place? While we have done a bang-up job of banging up life, it’s always love that puts it all back together again. And when genuine love puts things back together, it always puts them back together better than they were before we messed them up. And so, I would be so bold as to say that if it weren’t for love, existence would have never existed in the first place. And without love, it would be impossible to maintain that existence. Getting Back to Love Love is far more than something that has arisen from the penmanship of misty-eyed novelists or the musings of our own minds....