Evan Bortnick http://musa-vocalis.de/
Gesangsunterricht Wiesbaden
See. Love. Everywhere.
Noone knows how ridiculous this sounds more than I do. First time I heard anything similar, I started laughing and couldn’t stop. After all, let’s face it, life’s dangerous. There are a lot of situations just in the ‘natural’ world alone in which seeing love everywhere means not being prepared for emergencies, for accidents, for attack. This is all the more true in social transactions. I mean, really, if you’re not ready for all the games people play, all the power plays and passive aggression, all the violence, verbal and physical, that humans are capable of, then you’re simply putting yourself at the mercy of the lowest common human denominator.
In addition to all this, our brains are set up to anticipate and respond to attack and aggression even before we have a chance of being conscious of it. Important parts of the limbic system send quick and dirty messages throughout the entire body, preparing us for fight, flight or freeze LONG before it trickles into awareness. So even with conscious and loving intentions, we are overcoming immense and potent impulses honed by millions of years of Darwinian, jungle-like selection. The fact that you’re reading this mirrors the fact that your parents were survivors and their parents and their parents, all the way back to the beginning of time. This is no small thing.
Depending on which Maslowian Need Hierarchy you take, “Love” doesn’t appear til around the 4th or 5th tier! This implies that there are a number of important building blocks which need to be organized, a number of basic needs which must be necessarily and sufficiently fulfilled before ‘Loving’ even becomes a viable possibility. For some (and I’m sure we’ve all known them) ‘love’ remains merely the pursuit of one of these unfulfilled basic needs and nothing more.
This is just my point; there IS a meta-need to fulfill these needs and get to the balance where ‘love’ is possible. Even if our evolution is red in tooth and nail, this IS a striving towards……WHAT? I’ve only been able to answer this question with something like; LOVE!!! I know it sounds corny. The drive behind it is palpable.
For me, practically speaking, this opens the possibility to see love everywhere. Even in the basest, most obnoxious, most violent and most seemingly unloving of behaviors and attitudes (even and especially in the self!), there can be found this striving towards the fulfillment of the need to love. I’ll tell you something else; even if that IS total bullshit, I, personally would still construct the belief for myself for no other reason than it gives me internal peace and balance.
Evan Bortnick http://musa-vocalis.de/
Gesangsunterricht Wiesbaden
