Recently I’ve been thinking about love. Valentine’s Day has come and gone, but my mind is still stuck on love.
The other day I walked into a building to attend a meeting and noticed another woman heading towards the same meeting, walking slowly and looking uncomfortable. I asked if she was okay and she replied that she had hurt her back, but that she was fine and I shouldn’t be concerned.
“But I am concerned!” I said.
My fellow meeting participant laughed and we hobbled to the meeting together, she with her bad back and me with my bad knee.
Even as we had our big, grownup meeting, I kept thinking, Have we, as a species, become so hard or so fearful that we don’t want our fellow humans to express their love and concern for us?
Often on TV, people will say “I love you” to nearly perfect strangers. The first person to get voted off Survivor every season walks offscreen to a chorus of “Love you!” from people they’ve known for less than 24 hours. Comedians onstage will call out “Love you all!” to their audiences.
These casual declarations of love have always bothered me. We shouldn’t be so flippant with our “Love yous,” I would think. They should be reserved for the people we actually love, like our children, our partner, or our parents.
But in thinking about my bad-backed acquaintance, I’ve completely changed my thought process on this. Suddenly the idea of giving out flippant “I love yous” seems delightful. Instead of being stingy with my words of affection and concern, I’m going to throw them around like confetti!
Because let’s face it: the world is often a wall of granite that we have to chisel through day by day. We don’t have to chisel alone. Standing beside us are eight billion other human beings who are all working on their own sections of the wall, too.
These other humans are just like us, with hearts that can break, minds that can worry, and bodies that can hurt… and, well, I love them!
So far as we know, we’re the only species of our level of intelligence in the entire universe. Just us. For goodness sake, doesn’t that make us all part of an exclusive club? And shouldn’t we be able to express our love for our fellow club members?
So to my friend with the bad back, I did think about you and I felt sorry for you and I sent positive thoughts into the universe for healing.
And, fellow chiselers at the wall, I love you.
