Life Lessons about Love

Difficult people are our teachers - or so it is said - and I believe this to be true. Yet there is a more profound lesson that I have just begun to learn with the death of my mother.

The approach we all hear so much about is that we have to love those people who hurt us in the sense of “love thine enemies”. Yet when that comes to parents there is an added wrinkle. I found I was sending them love, but in a corner of my soul I was still hoping that the fact of my sending them love and understanding would cause things to change. In a confused backwater of my mind I hoped that one day there would be a breakthrough.

And this is where hope steers us wrong, because thinking that way is like giving a present and expecting a certain type of response for oneself. It is, in one way, a bribe. The essence of real love is that it is given with no expectation of any return at all. You do it because it’s what you do; not because it’s “right”, or will earn karma points, or bring about change, or impress the neighbors.

We love because, at bottom, if we are true to the best part of who we are, we cannot do anything else.

Getting to that point is the hard part. But we have to try.