Could You Be Loved?

Giving, receiving, and evading love

Hi Zan, Hi Pa

Volume #19

June 25th, 2024

HI, ZAN:  I’d like to explore the idea of love.  What are your thoughts on the subject?

HI, PA: I needed to drink my coffee and ponder this one a bit… 

Ok, I’m caffeinated! Personally, I think love is knitted into the fabric of all life—it’s everywhere all at once, and we tap into it in different ways and at different times throughout our lifespans. If you think about it, love is really just a survival instinct. It’s often what leads to procreation, and the people and animals we love are usually our allies, those with whom we band together to overcome life’s challenges. How would we have made it this far as living beings without love?

That explanation may distill love into something almost scientific, but to me it makes the concept even more magical—we couldn’t exist without love, and because of that it’s indistinguishable from life itself. 

Does that make sense? How does that compare to your view of love?

PA:  Except for “it’s often what leads to procreation,” I never thought about love that way…which is an example of why I enjoy these conversations with you. 

I grew up hearing—and still sometimes hear—the phrase ”God is love,” which has always been hard for me to wrap my mind around.  But, if you think of God as inhabiting everything from subatomic particles to solar systems, as I do, then your description above makes that phrase understandable for me.  So, thank you.

The late Thomas Merton, one of my favorite writers and thinkers, said something like, “Modern man can’t believe that even a God loves him.”  If that’s true, and if love is, in your words, “the fabric of all life,” then what is it about modern life that makes it so hard for us to feel the love that’s all around us?

ZAN: I think we’ve insulated ourselves from that love by seeking a replacement for it in the digital world. As we mentioned in our recent conversation about human touch, the interactions we have online are a poor replacement for real human contact, and I think one result of that is the feeling that love is just beyond reach. 

In American society especially, there’s also a huge focus on individualism—it’s easy to get wrapped up in your own worries and thoughts, losing sight of anything beyond the confines of your mind. The relationship with the self is the one that follows you around all day, so if you don’t love yourself (which often seems harder than loving others), how can you expect to be open to love at all?

PA:  Yes, I think it can often be harder to love oneself, and forgive oneself, than it is to love and forgive another person.  We’ve gotten even more ‘modern’ than when Merton wrote that—which was long before the digital age.  The online era has definitely exacerbated our modernity.  We’ve talked about how the internet interferes with or dilutes actual relationships, and now it seems that extends to our relationship with ourselves, as well.  

But I’m thinking in broader terms and wondering about his use of the word ‘modern.’  As, over the centuries, technology has made us more comfortable, it’s also moved us farther from the natural world, separated us from it.  Physically, we are part of that world, of course; it can’t be otherwise.  But I wonder if there’s been a kind of movement away from the body and into the mind, away from the senses and into our thoughts, and if that somehow makes us feel alienated from, and less at home in, the world, and if that less-at-home sense then undermines the love we should naturally feel for ourselves.

ZAN: Well put, and I wonder if this is related to the rise in mental health conditions over the last decades…

PA: I’m just fishing around here, but it seems to me that a big part of love is acceptance.  Comfort with the beloved.  Can we fully love ourselves, can we be fully comfortable with ourselves, if we’re alienated from the natural world, that is, from our home?  As humanity has evolved and we’ve become more and more able to control or command or subdue the natural world, have we also gradually lost a sense of belonging?   

ZAN: These are some really interesting questions, Pa. You’ve prompted me to contemplate the relationship between a sense of belonging and the ability to feel love, which is a connection I wouldn’t have made. 

In some ways, it would make sense if all the conveniences of the modern world helped us be more open to love. After all, if you don’t need to focus your energy on growing and harvesting food for nutrition or making your way over a mountain by horseback to get where you need to go, shouldn’t you have more mental room and energy to give and receive love? I think we’re starting to realize (both the two of us and our society as a whole), though, that it’s not quite that simple. 

Maybe that’s because love is a form of connection, of recognizing the divinity (or universe, God, energy, spirit—whatever word you have for it) in each other. In a world where we rely on technology and ourselves as individuals rather than the people or nature around us, we have fewer opportunities to stumble across that realization, what the Upanishads (some of my favorite Hindu texts) call “I am that.”  

I definitely sense that it’s easier to feel isolated in the modern world, but as someone who hasn’t been around for that long, I honestly don’t know if it was any different during other eras of human life. Haven’t humans always been drawn to and from love like waves finding their way back to the shore after being pulled out to sea?