just because love is complicated doesn't mean i shouldn't try (take 2)

i believe love can change the world.

i'd like to say that one hundred trillion times and to everyone i meet or ever have met. i like the way it sounds in my heart. this belief is my core. i'm sorry that it hasn't fully penetrated my exterior yet, but the transformation started on the inside and it's moving slowly. it will happen though: someday my actions will reflect my beliefs. someday i will do what i know.

most of the time when something is wrong, i think it means there's not enough love. our brains are sneaky machines that hide the people we don't want to love from our view when we are taking soul inventory. this way, we can feel pretty good about ourselves and our interactions with the people around us, even while harboring bad feelings for a person or group.

we interpret disagreeing with someone's position/beliefs/behavior as a reason to not love them, and we excuse ourselves for acting unkindly. we convince ourselves that our feelings in those cases are justified.

no. disagreeing is not a reason. the people who are hardest for us to love are the people we must love most. (i believe this but i'm still puzzling over why.)

i've been thinking about an oped by david brooks published here in the nytimes. (p.s. david brooks is my favorite. thanks jack.) brooks talks about the built-in "spirit of sympathy" humans have that helps us bond with each other through caring. read what he says (it's good):

"As a result of this sympathy and these sentiments, people are usually pretty decent to one another when they relate person to person. The odd thing is that when people relate group to group, none of this applies. When a group or a nation thinks about another group or nation, there doesn’t seem to be much natural sympathy, natural mimicry or a natural desire for attachment. It’s as if an entirely different part of the brain has been activated, utilizing a different mode of thinking.

Group-to-group relations are more often marked by calculation, rivalry and coldness. Members of one group sometimes see members of another group as less than human: Nazi and Jew, Hutu and Tutsi, Sunni and Shiite.

Political leaders have an incentive to get their followers to use the group mode of cognition, not the person-to-person. People who are thinking in the group mode are loyal, disciplined and vicious against foes. People in the person-to-person mode are soft, unpredictable and hard to organize."

even when we disagree--especially when we disagree, as groups or individuals--i believe in loving each other. people across the news are lamenting the state of washington and our broken political mechanism. what a little love would do to grease or clog the cogs (depending on how you see it). the best part about love is you can't fake it. maybe you can fake the actions, but then it's not love. it's fake love. love is a powerful word, a semantic heavyweight. it contains its own conditions without which love wouldn't be love, with sincerity and selflessness at the top of the list.

love is power because it helps us let go of the self, and love is pain because it helps us take on the other. in other words: you can't hurt me (because i'm already willing to give everything i have for those i love), but you can hurt my brothers and sisters.

and so God weeps.

i hope you don't think i'm suggesting that love makes things easier, simpler, clearer. i'm not. if anything, love muddies things up and tangles the web that holds us all in precarious connection.