L is for the Way You Look at Me...

I haven’t been keeping up this blog as well as I had originally planned I would when I first created it. I just get so busy with life and experiences that I tend to forget to record what I have been learning and experiencing. Also many of the things that I have been learning have been rather personal and not meant to be posted for the world to see. These lessons are better left in my heart and my memory and kept between the select few that have been the main characters in my life right now.
However, something that I have been pondering upon, I do want to share, it’s about love. The past few months I have been learning a lot about love, all sorts of love. I found this definition on Wikipedia that I rather like:
“Love is an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment. Love is also a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection; and ‘the unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another’. Love may also be described as actions towards others or oneself based on compassion, or as actions towards others based on affection.”
Love isn’t always that romantic kind people tend to think Valentine’s Day is all about. It just tends to be the first kind of love that comes to people’s thoughts when the idea is mentioned. It’s not about the hugs, kissing, finding the right person. I love the definition above because it deals with the love you feel for family, friends, for people around us every day, and everyone else I left out in this list.
My Dad’s cousin Phillip Carlson wrote a thought-provoking book called You Were Made to Love and talking in a broad scope on this book it’s about how, as humans, we are made to love and be loved, not hate others, ourselves and that God loves us always and forever.
Yes, from day one we have this ability to love, we are not born with hate and other negative feelings and emotions, those are taught, taught through people acting that way towards us and seeing others being treated in a negative way.
Just in the recent months I have come to understand love a bit more. And to better express what I have been learning I want to share an analogy that has come to mind.
When we are young our understanding and ability to love is like a sapling or a new sprout of a tree. That sapling or spout has great potential and grows fast and strong in your youth as we love everyone around us, parents, siblings, friends, etc. Yet, our ability to understand love and its complexities is not yet in our reach. Our understanding of love and our abilities don’t quite go as deep as it can in our youth. Though in the time when we start getting romantic feelings in our early teen years we feel that love is deep, though that is just from our perspective, limited perspective. Yes, that understanding of love and our ability is deeper than as a young child, but there is still more learning to do in the years to come. As we grow and our understanding stretches out and deepens so does our ability, just as a tree grows and the roots deepen and strengthen. The more we learn about the world around us and ourselves, who we really are despite what the world tries, to tell us, our ability to love more deeply than we ever imagine, will happen.
When you meet that someone special that you can give your heart to and you let yourself been seen and honesty live freely in your relationship both of you will experience a deeper kind of love past the physical, but an understanding of each other where the lasting kind of love is and will continue to grow.
In any relationship; friends, family, romantic, classmate, teacher-student, neighbor, the list goes on and on, when honesty is applied (with tact) love can be there openly and grow and a better understanding will always be there.
I thought I knew what love was before but these past few months of this year, yet I have learned so much of how little I knew and understood. I learned how much more my ability to love needed and could grow and I am glad I had this opportunity to better understand such a great and important virtue that everyone needs in their lives and I look forward to learning more and more as the years go by. For I am never done learning.

New Start Each Day!

I once gave an advice to someone who was worried about some things in their life, "You know the thing about our pasts is that is not who we are now."
With this new year upon us now I am thinking a lot about the future and some on the past, what I didn't' in the past year, and years previous. I wasn't who I was when 2011 start and hopefully when 2012 ends I won't be that same person.
During my Junior year in high school I had read this very interest book, Siddhartha. The book goes through choices one man makes with his life. Well, while reading this book for my English class the discussion came up about how choices change us, making us different people each day. When we wake up in the morning we weren't the same person yesterday because we have new experiences, made more choices, have more memories.
Well, with New Year, I and everyone else, we have the oppurtunity to become even different than last year, even more better. The thing is when we enter into the desire to better ourselves we have let go of the past and move forward.
Quoting Rafiki from the Lion King, "Yes the past can hurt, but the way I see you can run from it or learn from it!"
Often when we try to change the past likes to sneak up on us and grab us by the ankles, for whatever reason. It's different for all of us. But this morning I watched a video that explains my thoughts in a unique way. This video got me thinking about this subject. It was a good way to start out the day!