Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Default Setting... LOVE

Diane asked me a question that I believe has remained unspoken by many who know me. I admire and respect her courage and candor in asking “so are you truly in love with all your readers? do you dislike anyone?” Well… the very nerve! [Yes I am kidding] But the questions are very important ones and deserve more of an answer than my initial response to them. So, here ‘tis.

First, my being “in love with all (of my) readers” is a matter of selective choice. I (just as you) have available to me the full range of possibilities for my response to the lives whose paths intersect mine. And I have made a conscious choice to make my “default setting” for my personal response to the world… LOVE. It really is that simple (as it must be for me to make it… ‘complex’ gives me a headache.)

Yes… (to answer your reflexive question) I have most definitely been hurt… disappointed… abused… taken advantage of… misunderstood… misquoted… (need I go on?) by others in life.
But my choice remains to have my initial response to others set on LOVE. And the rewards for that choice more than outweigh the total weight of all of the accumulated emotional scar-tissue from all of the unhappy occasions (and there have been PLENTY!) of my past. And do not even begin to voice your “well, if you had ever experienced what happened to me” stuff. My “stuff” is as legitimate to my life as anyone else’s is to them. Stinko is Stinko in the nostrils of the individual doing the inhaling. (How’s that for a profundity?)

And what about… rejection? That is probably the biggest fear of all who would entertain the thought of venturing into the land of loving. OK… Yes I have had and still have my loving of others rejected. So what?! Rejection is a valid option for anyone’s election. I respect and easily allow the rejection of my love. I do, after all, offer my love as a gift… not as a preconditioned, expectation-bound, negotiated device. I give it… you are perfectly free to accept, reject, or even ignore the gift… it is, after all, yours to do with as you please. This is the nature of a gift. And the consummate beauty of this gift is that it is self-replenishing. The more that I give… the more is regenerated… FREE!

Second… the other (dislike anyone) question… YES.



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