(Why) How You Love is More Important Than What You Love

One Simple Rule for Living

How you love is more important that what you love.

It’s one of the simplest and most profound rules for living. If you sit with it for a minute, really know it, you will grow. Here is what it means.

Maybe you think you already know it. Do you? Think of how you approach love. Just be honest with yourself. There’s no one else listening.

Mostly, we look for the “right” people, careers, passions. Do we not? Those that fit our preconceptions, and win the approval of our peers, families, friends. So we never really look in the wrong, unexpected, improbable places. The how becomes secondary to the what. We aren’t really seeing at all this way, are we?

So we are always searching for the “right” things to love. People, careers, passions, places. We think they can take our pain, emptiness, suffering away. Give our little lives purpose and presence. But this is what, not how.

We are always searching for things to love. But we are not really looking for ways to love things.

How should we love?

Our love should be pure, clear, true. I don’t mean that it should be infallible, superhuman, self-destructive. Here is what pure, clear, true love means. To really see something as it truly is, someone as they truly are.

Most of us don’t see the thing we think we love at all. We see our own mental representation of it. “It” is filtered through our thoughts, ideas, assumptions, all the burdens we bring with us. So we mostly see what we want it to be. What we can get from it, one day, if only. We see then, not now, that, not this.

When we look at a person, place, task, idea, we see an idealized or romanticised representation. Or we see our own grudges and resentments. Both are just flip sides, right? We see what we desperately need, because that is what we think is missing in us. We see our beliefs, which are our anxieties, fears, worries.

But we are not really seeing the person, place, thing, at all, are we? We are seeing what is broken in ourselves, and putting it into them. We are just seeing ourselves, what we can have, get, possess. How can we love them this way? We are seeking to take, not give, right? And love is giving. Therefore we are not loving from the beginning. This blind beginning, never really seeing, is why so many relationships, careers, lives end in futility and unhappiness.

To really see someone or something means to put our preconceptions aside. All our knowledge, ideas, judgment. Even all our needs. Not forever, but until we really just see them. Become aware of the truth of them. Their frailties and weaknesses, their longings and hidden spirits. What are they really, stripped away of all that is not really there? Now we see them. And only now can we really love them.

Here is what we have learned.

Love is not a destination. Love is a way. A way of being. A way of seeing. Everything around us. It is a way of putting aside the thought of “I am”, so the awareness of “this is” can arise.

When we are thinking “I am”, we can never really experience “this is”, can we? But “this is” is the beginning of true, pure, clear love.

How you love is endless. You become the river, flowing into all things. When love is the way, not the destination, then and only then can there be love in every action and intention and moment of your brief life. Right?

Live such a way.

Umair

London

May 2016