Please remember that very little of what people worry about is actually real. Mortgage payments, taxes, project deadlines, grade-point averages, the values of assets and liabilities--these are all just numbers in peoples heads. They are not the law of gravity; nobody dies or gets seriously hurt if one of these numbers is forgotten. They only have a conditional reality given them by the sheer number of people agreeing to abide by the convention. People are real. And love is real. I dont mean that hormone-induced fantasy of perceived, desperate need that we have come to call love. The love that gives freely of itself is real: the love that seeks to comfort a relative or a friend, or that nurtures the growth and enthusiasm of a student, or that reaches out to a stranger in need of help, or merely offers a smile to the person handing it coffee. This is reality expressing itself in our midst. It is the true expression of what we really are. The rest is just convention; a convenience for creating circumstances in which we can learn how our love is most effectively expressed. And that means that when the convention cuts us off from compassion, it is time to learn to transcend the convention, or to throw it out as having outlived its usefulness.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 16:40:57 +0000