Thursday, July 26, 2007

A LOVEly World

We must love one another or die - WH Auden (1907-1973)


In this world, everyone loves each other. It’s only up to us how we express and experience our love for others. By love, I mean that by which we live in harmony with everything and everyone around us. A year after birth, while gradually making sense of the surrounding world, we get to appreciate – often – the unconditional love of our parents and family. This is natural love because we try to respond to the affection of our family and in fact, this is what stays on with us during our lifetime.

Once we step into the world – by moving out of the house into a school – some may show the love they’ve experienced in their family; others may not. Yet, we adjust to this new situation in life and get to know a new kind of love. As we move from one class to another class in school, we feel degrees of warmth with classmates, teachers, staff and others. This makes us very choosy about our love for them. This selective love includes those whom we believe are worthy of our love and excludes others. This is most common, but we needn’t be stuck with this kind of love.

Actually, I believe there are “circles of love” we gradually draw in our life. In the innermost circle are our parents and our family. In the circle around the innermost circle are our friends and people whom we’ve chosen to love. Then, few more circles with some more people. Once we draw these circles, we come to know how to organize and distribute our love. We rank our love and grade it, so that you know how much to give to the people in respective circles.

I believe that there is no harm in drawing these circles but one would suffer in life if one gets caught in these circles permanently. As we grow in life, we must aspire to bisect these circles and make way for the love in one circle to leak into another. As much as we can, we must try to minimize and merge the number of circles. The innermost circle where we have absolute love must expand to overlap the outer circles.

This expansion results in a universal love for everything and everyone around us. This love enables us to believe that most of us are good and the remaining are less good. This love embraces everyone and everything as equally respectable and loveable ones in the world. The climax of this love is compassion where not only do I want to grow and progress but We want to grow and progress. You see your success not in your individual acts, but also as an achievement of the humanity and the society supporting you. One should stand out as a unique student who lives with the richness of knowledge and in oneness with the world. And, be and become what one is potentially capable of.

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