Love Others As Your Self

It's a suggestion that begs the question of how do I love myself?

And basically my answer is that I put up with myself because I am unable to get away from myself. I'm left with making the best of things with myself because there's no escaping being ever in my own presence.

But with others, the proximity is not so close nor so immediately necessary. Not only can I remove myself from being in the presence of others, I can't help but be removed from being in the presence of most people most of the time. So I can't really love them the way I love myself in terms of time allotment. I can't attend to them moment by moment like I attend to myself.

So it must mean something else. Some quality having to do with when I'm in the presence of others. And then perhaps it's suggesting that I would have to put up with them like I put up with myself. I would have to take them for all their goods and bads, like I have to take myself. I would have to take responsibility for their faults and errors and mistakes, just as I have to take responsibility for my own. I would have to include them in my personal responsibility, just as I attend to my own. Hm. That sounds pretty impossible, or at least quite imposing, difficult, overwhelming.

I like the idea of people taking care of themselves for the most part. I notice society gives a lot of lip service to that, too. "Nobody can make you feel any certain way. It's your own responsibility for how you interpret and process your feelings." "Anyone can be anything they want to be if they put their mind to it." "Nobody is a victim." "Everyone is responsible for their own happiness."

"Loving" is a rather vague word much magnified by the power breathed in it by culture. It vaguely, almost admonishingly, suggests we should all be more loving toward each other. "Love is the highest calling." "What the world needs now is love sweet love." "Love is all you need." Meanwhile, I rather like loving what I find lovable which has to do with my own preferences, aesthetics, interests, tolerances, choices as to who and what and how much I deal with at any given time. I like to express my personal traits for discernment. And this has a way of measuring some people more in and more worthy and interesting and satisfying to relate to than others. I rather like that freedom to decide. In utter frankness, I have to say I like turning away from some people while turning more toward others. Ugly as that sounds.

But I notice it gets me into trouble. I have my list of people I've turned away from. And that doesn't make me so happy that they're not happy with my turning away. I'm actually not always all that proud of my aesthetics. They encroach like a prejudice willing to abandon that which doesn't live up to my intrinsic or acquired tastes. And I notice they tend to like to get more refined over time. Quite self congratulatory! Yet I also notice there's something ugly about their increasingly sensitive justification for rejecting that which appears too ugly to relate to.

So, love the ugliness? Love the murderer, the confused and deranged and dysfunctional, the bore, the kook, the rude, the irritating? As though all of these qualities are in me to love in myself, too? I'm not sure I like the sound or challenge of that.

How strange the universe should make such unlikenesses, and then send a savior down to suggest we get along anyway. Where after all, is the likeness among so much unlikeness? Why create creatures who tend to be increasingly ever so finely attuning to their own tastes and temperaments, and then mess with them by suggesting they love beyond their limits? And why wouldn't a savior take their own advise and love us as we are, without asking us to change a thing about ourselves?

There must be fun is such maddening conundrums, of which, the universe has made me such a fine fit to be tied to.


--Steve