The one characteristic that defines our lives is scarcity. None of us have enough money, time, health, opportunity, satisfaction, fulfillment, etc. Yet of all these scarce resources, one we have in boundless abundance is LOVE.
I know none of us receive as much love as we want, but our capacity to give love is limitless. Have you ever considered that none of us receive all the love we want because none of us give all the love we can? Culturally speaking, we treat love like it is the rarest treasure. And as a result, we reserve it for only the most deserving people.
But what if we have real reasons to love more broadly? What if love in its purest form is simply the joy we feel from bringing happiness to others who make our lives worth living?
The culmination of human experience has provided the society, technology, culture, morays, virtues, and critical lessons that we benefit from every day. Our contemporaries provide every aspect of our lives we are incapable of providing for ourselves. Our very existence remains a function of choices people we will never know make each and every day. Yet somehow, we are able to go on each day as if we are primarily responsible for our own well-being.
The time is long past for us to realize a fellow human installed the brakes on our car, found the flaw in our aircraft, caught the assailant who meant us harm, paved the way for our success, introduced us to our spouses, yielded in rush hour traffic when we desperately had to get there, and found the way to serve our food despite the sick child they have at home.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, we are immersed in a world of many people fully deserving of our love.
All we need to do is stop thinking of ourselves and notice.
2 replies on “Scarcity in all things but one…”
i’ve observed that one can only give what one has been given, that is, what one has learned how to give by example. many lacked sufficient familial / parental love as children and thereby have become, in turn, insufficiently loving parents lovers or friends. dostoyevsky somewhere remarks (i’m paraphrasing) *Hell is the incapacity to love* … which reflects the apparent legions of the miserable (regardless of class race sex religion etc) taking love they neither fully feel nor can wholly give. like tantalus in the underworld, so many shades thirst yet cannot drink; the human predicament is also marbled through with lovelessness, almost as much as it’s graced by love, because too many bear the bottomless scars of, crippled from within by, childhood-without-love. as the song goes “No one you can save that can’t be saved” …
Our reasons for not loving more are real. Yet our ability to change is persistent. While some portion of humanity is tragically broken, the rest of us have no excuse.