WTF is Possible?
Part One: On Love and What We Know
Hi, reader. Thank you for being here.
“Many of us are not sure what we mean when we talk of Love, or how to express Love” and yet “everyone assumes we will know how to Love instinctively” (hooks, 2001) [capitalizations are this author’s edit].
We see now that is not the case.
Our perception is informed by everything we experience, especially what happened during our brain’s physical development. Loving reminder; babies are truly helpless and “children can only rely on well-meaning adults to help them…” (hooks, 2001). That included you, once upon a time!
In our personal lives, we indiscriminately absorb our first experiences of what was labeled Love in the home of origin and in our initial connections. We assume, naturally, that what we know is the truest expression of Love. But so rarely are we born into the kind of transformative Love we crave, so “we spend a lifetime undoing The damage caused by cruelty, neglect, and all manners of Lovelessness” (hooks, 2001).
We protect our hearts by closing ourselves off from connection and suppressing our full emotional experience. This makes sense to wounded parts of us – they did not know that Love is possible, and they know suffering with certainty. They deny the possibility of deep Love that heals because it hurts so deeply to consider “transformative Love exists but hasn’t consistently been available” (hooks, 2001).
Merely considering the idea invites Grief. Grief! Immeasurable grief! And most of us haven’t yet learned to cooperate with grief. Maybe the catastrophic and unnecessary Lovelessness in IsntReal is your first witnessing.
We have the option to stay in silent mourning. If we ignore the call to Love, we will stay. We may suppress the suffering… Distract, deny, lash out, act in ways we don’t understand… We are allowed this choice.
Richard C. Swartz, the creator of Internal Family Systems, suggests in his book “No Bad Parts” that we all have a number of unconscious burdens. Some are inflicted, others are inherited. The “legacy burden” is his term for beliefs that are passed down the ancestral line. The idea that human beings are inherently selfish, reckless, and violent is what I’d like to call a “paradigm burden”: a belief that transfers for multiple generations and across our species’ shared understanding of the world.
We are monkey! We mimic! We’re taught at a young age, decades before it’s cognitively possible to develop discernment, that our government consensually guides our wellbeing. We of the colonial persuasion faithfully echo their dogma: that enforced will is not only necessary, but consensual. They feign investment in our greatest interest so we give them our trust. We’re wiping off sweat from the rat race they trap us in. Exhausted. We can’t always recognize our position and that’s by design… but we’re “democracy’s” bitch and the war machine’s foot soldiers.
Trust is vital but only when offered to the trustworthy.
If we want to move towards a Loving world, we must commit to thinking and acting differently. We can’t dismiss the reality of Love or overlook the places where Love is absent. When able, we stop bypassing our grief. We are rewarded with experiences we once barricaded from us: true hope. Spacious possibility. Transformative Love.
We start by recognizing that 95% of what the dominators—the capitalists and colonialists— call Love is a mix of other things: Possession, control, and domination. We all have much to unlearn. This is not a single once occurring Epiphany. It’s an ongoing practice of questioning, discerning, discarding and adapting new thoughts and ideas that do align with Love. Yes, at times it’s a steep challenge. We can do hard things! Especially together!
But what is Love? Would you like to know?
We define our terms so we recognize Love when we meet it. Believing that Love is mysterious does not serve us or our goals. Love has precise ingredients (and it’s more than just a feeling). According to the matriarch of Love, bell hooks, the Act of Loving requires: “care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, open and honest communication", and responsibility (hooks, 2001, p. 5). More on that later.
We waste no time convincing those committed to Love’s absence. Why would we? There are enough people earnestly anticipating us to join the quest. Yes, right now!
We create a Loving world by rejecting the call to adapt to circumstances where Love is lacking. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.
“We want to live in a world we love, and so we create it” (Gottesdiener, 2023).
See also: “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” by Audre Lorde.
References:
Gottesdiener, S. F. (2023). Many Moons Planner, Moon Studio.
hooks, b. (2001). all about love: new visions, HarperCollins.
MD, B. N.-H., & Bowers, K. (2020, March 5). Humans aren’t the only ones that help out their adult kids- here’s why animals do it too. ideas.ted.com. https://ideas.ted.com/humans-arent-the-only-ones-that-help-out-their-adult-kids-heres-why-animals-do-it-too/.
Ph.D, Schwartz, R. (2021). No Bad Parts, Sounds True.
This really resonates with me. It’s so true that we often assume we should just know how to love, but those early experiences really shape our understanding, and usually in ways we don’t even realize. The idea of unlearning those patterns to find real, transformative Love is powerful and definitely challenging. Thank you for sharing this.