Love Letter

We live in a world that trains us all to suspect that people want something from us, that we should always be careful and it is in many ways and unfortunately an existential necessity – we can not trust everyone because this is not and likely never will be the best of all possible worlds.

What this does is makes us orient all of our behavioural and reflexive psychological grammars and patterns of thought towards living a superficial, unhealthy and unhappy life that is isolated and dissociated from each other. We all define ourselves by a difference that is not really necessary and only generates fear.

If someone ever appears in our world offering nothing but selfless, authentic friendship and a gift of caring, loving compassion – this can be hard to understand. All of our behavioural instincts have been fine-tuned to doubt authenticity to a point at which, when it does arrive, we automatically find it an affront to our sensibilities and expectations of competition or an associated symbolic economy of possessions to which we have become accustomed.

There are interesting and unresolved (perhaps unresolvable) problems in human individual and collective identity evident here. We self-define by (a) difference that then problematises the unity and closure that we originally sought to obtain through self-definition, introducing a foundational dissonance and insecurity into that self-definition before we have begun to explore what self or identity even means.

The truth is, our inability to accept the possibility of selfless love directed towards ourselves is really the flip-side and mirror-image of our inability to selflessly love ourselves. To selflessly love is to authentically love and the giving up of ego and of ownership or aspirations to control is the hardest (but also and counter-intuitively the simplest) thing of all.

It is a consequence of the natural flow of time and matter into disordered states and thermodynamic equilibrium that it is easier to break a heart than make one but really, it is a matter of simple wisdom that we should learn to just let go of control and aspirations to possessive self-identities (of self or other) if we are ever going to be truly happy and free.