To Love and be Loved….Part 1

New book I’m reading……by Sam Keen

Seems like everyone I talk to, everywhere I look, relationships are stressed…..Friendships are falling apart, family upset at eachother, marriages a mess….what’s wrong with us?  Everyone thinking that their life is not as good as someone else’s….the grass is greener, etc.

I came across this book…..not looking for romantic love necessarily but for love in an even bigger understanding….why do we fail at this so badly?  Isn’t the greatest commandment to LOVE?

I’m not very far into this book yet, I’m trying to take each chapter in…but what I’ve read is good…I would recommend it to everyone….on any LOVE level……even to understand to love yourself.

Excerpts from the book:

….The paradox of love that I want to understand was stated by the early atomic physicist who said, “I have my solutions, but I don’t know how to arrive at them.”…….

I can offer no final explanation for why we idealize love so much and practice it so little.

….For openers, consider the lopsided amount of attention we have paid to the definition, measurement, and cultivation of intelligence, in contract to our failure to investigate the many modes of love. We have a national obsession with IQ, but we never seriously consider the possibility tht we possess an LQ, a love quotient, a generic aptitude for empathy or compassion that may be enhanced or diminished by circumstances.

As Erich Fromm said in the midcentury classic, The Art of Loving, “In spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important that love: success, prestige, money, power – almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.”

…when we focus obsessively on romance, the single most irrational, volatile, and often illusory form of love, we fail to consider that love may be an art involving skills that need to be developed and practiced throughout a lifetime. As a consequence, we have no school, no curriculum. that teaches us how to cultivate the disciplines and delights of love that give meaning and depth to our lives. When it comes to love, we are emotional illiterates. We know far more about aggression, competition and developing willpower.  Further to the point: Because we have adopted intimacy as our one test and model of love, we miss the infinite variety of forms that human love can take.

Any thought????

To be continued……………