CHOOSE LOVE

Another tool that we can draw upon to shift our perspective is love.

We’ve all heard the merits of loving ourselves, loving others and loving the planet, right?

But not all of us have been able to use all that love to positively affect the daily transactions of our lives.

The pace of our lives and the intensity of our emotions or personality often prevent us from acting with love as a code.

It may be hard to be kinds to others, or ourselves or to face a critical situation with the perspective love can provide.

In order to think of love as a fundamental code, one by which we can live, it may help to compare it with another code, one by which many of us are already guiding our lives: power.

In the time we live in, power is still defined very much by external references, such as money, status, position or the ability to influence others.

We are powerful if we have these things and powerless if we don’t.

They can be taken away.

Love cannot be taken away.

You can always choose to love someone, something or a situation, whether you feel those things merit love or not.

That is true power.

Love, as a choice, is power.

Instead of choosing to hate, fight, undermine or manipulate, you could choose to love, and that choice might help you find a more positive solution to any problem.

For example, if someone betrayed my friendship, I could decide to banish that person from my life and forever speak of how he did me wrong. On the other hand, I could gain a quick exit to the pain by choosing love to find perspective.

I don’t have to agree with what the person did, nor do I have to forgive them. I just have to choose to love them and myself and elevate myself to a place where I can see they did me a favour.

Now I know he was not as true a friend as I thought, and I can go on in my life with a lesson learned. A much more powerful choice, I think, than holding onto bitterness, even though many would be justified to do so.

When it comes to love, we often don’t honour ourselves enough and therefore have little or no wisdom-producing perspective.

Loving yourself or someone else does not mean abandoning self by overindulging in the feeling or its intoxicating effects.

It doesn’t mean sacrificing yourself to love someone or merely to have another person like you.

It means harnessing your emotion and awareness to create the most good in your life.

That means that if a relationship is destructive, you should get out.

It’s not an invitation to love harder.

There is no power in loving harder – only in loving better.

Here is Jane’s story of gaining perspective by changing what love means to you.

Jane was a smart woman in her early thirties who came to me to do some career and life planning. She was engaged to an older man who had children from a previous marriage and did not want any more. Jane worked for a large bank but longed to own her own business someday. We had come up with a plan to improve her satisfaction with her current job, which included asking for a pay rise and revamping her responsibilites. 

Naturally, as we discussed her career, Jane’s impending wedding kept coming into the conversation.

I had a strong sense that this marriage was a mistake, yet i withheld my judgment. 

As we explored her job, her desired new business and her upcoming marriage, it was clear to me that Jane’s definition of love was erring on the side of self-sacrifice.

She was struggling with the realisation that by marrying this man she was giving up the chance to have children of her own. It wasn’t appropriate for me to tell Jane what to do, yet I did tell her how I felt: “What I want for you, Jane, is a relationship where you don’t have to bend over backwards in order to fit in.”

She seemed hardly to acknowledge my comment, however two weeks later she reported that she had ended her engagement. She was quitting her job and taking a long trip abroad in order to explore herself and her life.

Until then, Jane’s meaning of love was to do what everyone else wanted her to, and to love harder meant giving up more of herself to make it work.

When she learned to love differently and therefore learned to love herself, her perspective changed. She saw that choosing to love herself meant that she had to reclaim the pieces of herself she had compromised.

Once she made the change, the direction she needed to take was clearer and the action she took immediate.

Wisdom had replace anxiety and confusion.

She had gained the perspective that gave her clarity to do the right thing for herself.