CUPID'S SECRET
[Reprinted with permission from LOST & FOUND ON LANA’I: The Trials & Transformation of One New Yorker Living in Paradise, 1995, by Marcia Zina Mager]
Love is such a controversial word. Ask a hundred different people and you'll get a hundred different meanings. Hollywood once told us, "Love is never having to say you're sorry." Religions say "God is Love." In the 60s, love was sharing everything, including your mate. Today, self-help books tell us that sometimes “love” can be enabling or co-dependent. The word is tossed around too easily. Turn on the news and you'll find people murdering for "love." Everywhere people are running from it or spending their lives running toward it.
Years ago, I wrote romance novels for a while. Back then, love was a simple formula. Boy meets girl, they fall in love and live happily ever after. But it's not that simple anymore. Love no longer fits into a neat little leather brief case carried by man and woman. Today love can mean that boy meets boy, girl meets girl, boy meets lonely extraterrestrial...
So on the heels of this internationally celebrated Valentine's Day, the question I'm pondering is...what is love? Where do you find it? Is it hunger and starry-eyed longing, like the media tells us in commercials and movies? When I look inside myself for an authentic nuts-n-bolt definition, I find only contradiction. Certainly, I'd like to think of myself as a totally loving person. I love Dennis. I love my family, my friends, my dog and cat. Yet in my life when I look at how I love others, I fall short in my eyes. I see my tremendous limitations. My own insecurities and childhood wounds have conspired at times to push me into the ring with people I care about, swinging with all my might. And often it's not me that goes down for the count.
So how do I find out what love really is? Whenever I find myself in this painful dilemma, my heart gently reminds me of what a wise friend once taught me. His name was Brian and he himself was an extremely wounded man. Yet he once had a powerful insight, a profound vision that perhaps is the most meaningful definition, for me, of what love is really all about. Brian once told me he died on the operating table, after a brutal bike accident. He was one of those rare people who had a life-after-death experience. But instead of traveling through a long dark tunnel to arrive at a brightly lit spot with smiling relatives reaching toward him, he saw something much simpler. He saw himself as he was: a tall, soft spoken man with haunting blue eyes standing there cradling someone in his arms. But that someone was not a child. It was a full grown man. And much to his surprise, that man was himself. Brian had a vision of cradling Brian. From this fleeting glimpse, he taught me about compassion. Compassion for myself. Compassion for my limitations, for my mistakes, for my deepest, darkest wounds. If I did something I felt was terrible; if I had failed miserably in my own eyes, before I could finish my barrage of self-punishing comments, Brian would interrupt me with a simple question. "Can you have some compassion for yourself?" he would ask quietly. "Compassion for this woman called Marcia who's struggling with this terrible mistake? Can you care about her, right now, even though she's failed?"
Inevitably that gentle question would allow me to let out a long deep sigh. A kind of peace would settle around me. And I would look inside myself and discover it wasn't that hard to answer "yes."
That, to me, is what love is all about. Compassion for ourselves. Because it's only then -- when I'm willing to care about myself no matter what I've done or said or thought -- that I can lift my eyes to another human being and say, with authenticity and power, I love you.
Happy Valentines Day.
