The title of this post could have been "Do you feel Love in all your relationships?" or may be a more simpler "Love, Life and Relationships". However, I came up with this title because of the fact that on most social occasions, and even at times while introspecting, we tend to associate the element of Love in our life only to our spouses or partners. People around us are not curious to know if we love our child/parent(s)/humanity/nature/existence or life as a whole. But almost everyone is interested to know whether Love exists in our relationship with our spouse. Reason probably is that the other halves of all these relationships except marriage are not chosen by us. When a child is born we don't control its form. We don't control or choose the humanity, nature or existence around us. We accept them either as a blessing if good or destiny if otherwise. However, we control who we chose as our or our child's spouse, the supposed-to-be life partner. We make this decision with our "great" human wisdom, the wisdom on which we bet a huge amount of money to treat and declare to the entire world of "wise" people around us, that we have found the perfect companion for our or our child's life journey. When we make this choice we consider that our great wisdom includes a degree in the subject of Love. We then go on to claim that Love will be and has to be an integral part of this chosen relationship. This is where this self-made mess starts, and this is where the culture of checking the crap-density of the mess of our fellow messed-up beings creeps in.
Have we ever imagined any relationship without Love? Or let me rephrase, have we ever imagined a life which need not have Love?
I believe that Love has not only been grossly not-understood but also it has been misused to defend our full-of-hate stances in arguments that happen quite so often with our so-called-loved ones. We often term these arguments as emotional and try to attribute them to presence, absence or lacking of Love. But I feel that they are actually psychological in nature. They arise because of different and often conflicting interpretations of a particular situation or an incident. These interpretations are based on the arguing individuals' value systems, the value systems which are either not-understood or misunderstood by the individuals themselves. Love is not a value, it an eternal experience that has as many definitions as are the positive human emotions. Ambiguous! We tend to use this ambiguity of Love to elude the ambiguity of our core values. We pick a definition of Love which is in line with what we expect our so-called-loved-one to do for us in a particular context, and then shift the complete focus to judge whether Love exists in our relationship or not.
Why do we not have an intent to identify our core values? Why do we tend to ignore the values which form the entire basis of our interpretation of situations, and thus lay the foundation of our understanding of life?
I live in a country that has its cultural history majorly influenced by Hinduism, a religion whose origins are claimed to date back to 1500 B.C. It is based on some revered ancient texts like Vedas, whose relevance and importance in current world is acknowledged worldwide. These ancient Hindu texts define principles that still apply to a great extent to our fast-moving modern lives. Hindu principles of life are quite open and liberal in nature, as compared to other religious beliefs and preachings. That's why they apply better to our lives when compared to many other religions. This open and liberal nature of Hinduism leads to two things in terms of an individual's understanding of the religion - first an interpretation based understanding of core values, and second the transcending of this interpretation (with few manipulations) into the individual's circle of influence. Every interpretation defines its own values, and each transcendence adds to a community of people believing in the given set of values. There may be some overlaps between the value systems of two such communities, but sufficient differences are deliberately maintained by the upper managements of each community, to sustain their USPs, and thus keep the follower-ship and associated money-mill running.
Our values form the basis of how we first perceive and then judge things or people around us. Simple chain of human cultural evolution goes something like - individuals form communities, communities form societies, and finally societies form cultures. Our country often boasts of its diverse cultural wealth on international stages. At the same time, it boasts of having the largest pool of intellect that is needed by the world to sustain global economy. Both the claims have some credibility, except for the factual misrepresentation of the diverse culture and the intellectual pool as drugs that have no side-effects. While diverse culture results in conflicting values, "intellect" is a misnomer for "education". What our country has is a very big pool of "educated" people who can do wonders if they are made to operate in an ideal world (which is modeled in the lessons of their curriculum). However, when put into the real world scenario, majority of these "educated" ones lose complete control of themselves and their lives. Of course exceptions are there but they are numbered, and the number is not big enough to put the claims that we do on the international stages.
A value-rich culture and a well "educated" mind, in a globalized scientifically advanced world, produce a confused soul. One of my fellow philosophy-idiot introduced me to the term "headless chicken", while kind-of showing a mirror to me :). I believe that our country has one of the biggest pools of "headless chicken" in the world. We have our own sets of abstract but fortified values that have sustained various evolutionary attacks over ages. Globalization has catalyzed an amalgamation of population from different cultures, bringing into the scheme of things a deluge of abstract values. The scientific advancement has made life so fast that often we do not have enough time, energy, or space to stop, think and move.
It is like we are driving our modernized life in a traffic of confused values, and there are no yellow lights in the signals at the culture crossroads. We can either stop and park, or keep moving without thinking, like a "headless chicken". A popular strategy that we, confused souls, take in such scenarios is to follow and stick to the visibly safest path. The path often tells us to "study" meticulously but not "learn". It tells us to "believe" in rites, rituals, and ancestral ways of living but not "question" them, and thus restricts our minds to a closed box of "thinking". While moving on this path, we come across various crossroads where we need to take important life decisions that can impact the course of rest of the journey of our lives. There are the opportunities where we can switch over from the current path to a path that shows better life prospects but with a risk of uncertainty. Whether we decide to stick to the already traversed path or switch to a new one, our natural tendency puts us into a constant evaluation of the actual merit of our decision.
If we look at it, this is situation for many people belonging to the educated middle-class of our country, to which I also belong. And in this stressful situation, along with screwing our overall understanding of life, we screw up the understanding of feelings and emotions like Love.
Our main religion has many number of Gods, and equal number of stories that give an elaborate account of social values that we, as humans, should live up to. It just occurred to me that our mythological texts and scriptures give an account of Love life of only one major God, who happened to have loved numerous women, none of whom ended up being his wife. Ironically, we have the photograph of that God and his most beloved woman printed on the invitation cards for solemnizing of a relationship that never existed between the God and his beloved women.
In such a setup of confused values, as soon as we enter our adolescence, we enter into a battlefield where abstract cultural values are fighting our biologically developing psyche. Add to it the pressure of the earning educational degrees to survive in the ever competing world. This leaves us with nil or minimal time to observe and identify our own selves. We get pushed onto the traffic-laden street with no idea about how to navigate through it. So we chose to quickly complete our paper-education and then earn a job that gives meager-but-enough-to-survive salary, and then, just because of the age, start assuming ourselves to have matured enough to find the Love of our life. And what do we know about Love at that stage? Living in a beautiful house with our partner, singing or spending time with him/her in a beautiful scenic locations, dance together and feel Love on social gatherings, travel, party, complete the family with a child and eventually grow old together. We overlook one of the very important aspects of companionship, that is "understanding". And its very natural to overlook this essential aspect. We never tried to understand ourselves, how can we think about a relationship based on understanding. Without identifying our own values, how can we find a person whose values might match to our unidentified values. We choose that person superficially, by looks or surface behavioral traits (mostly in case of love marriages), or by caste, astrology and societal rules (in case of arrange marriages). And then starts the never ending pursuit of aligning our unidentified values in the name of adjustment towards each other, and conformance to the standards of life set by the extremely virtuous people around us.
Big account of the problem, what is the solution?
After trying to clean this mess for many years now, I have learnt that a very important tool to overcome the situation is to first identify our core values, and then understand the relationship of our core values to the societal setup that we live in. Our societal setup is neither an ideological truth nor a practical truth, its a human existential truth. It cannot be judged right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable. It just exists. I have come across verified researches, that are also in line with life principles defined in Vedas, that we are on a constant path of learning which eventually leads to self-discovery as we keep growing in the experience called life. The learning slows down as we get old but it never ceases. I believe that if we introspect properly, we can form a very "good" (need not be 100% "correct") understanding of our core values. What are my core values?
- Keep learning while living thoughtfully. Take a mental pause once in a while in the otherwise long running and established daily routines, think about what's happening in my internal and external worlds, and think about how I can achieve or sustain a balanced co-existence between the two.
- Be open to change that comes along with ever-growing physical and psychological worlds.
- Control the controllable, in terms of my roles and responsibilities.
- Appreciate and respect acts of innocence, kindness, compassion, and/or help that happen around me. Try to add to these beautiful aspects of human existence.
- Respect food, avoid food wastage, and be thankful to almighty for being lucky to get food whenever I feel hungry.
- Respect sports, understand the sportsmen's spirit.
- Respect soldiers and the militia, try to understand and respect the spirit of the nation's defense forces. Try to do something for the soldiers in this lifetime.
- Respect dignity and freedom of choice of life of individuals around me.
- Try to be a good listener. Accept positive feedback with grace, embrace the negative feedback from life and people, and try to respond and not react to the negative feedback.
- Try to be selflessly selfish or selfishly selfless. At times I speak or act against the common social conventions, in an unsociable manner. That's my maverick self. But I try to leash myself with some restraint so that it does not become anti-social. Generally, the behavior is backed with some value-based reasoning.
- Be grateful to the nature and to almighty for blessing me with the material and non-material possessions that make me feel happy.
So my solution to the problem is to relieve ourselves and our partners from the stress of trying to find Love within each other. Try to know, and then grow ourselves. Fulfill the responsibilities towards our current internal and external existences, try to achieve a balance, and start/resume on the path of learning and self-discovery. Many values exist in our worlds in many forms, not just in the form of people around us. Once we start realizing values within and around us, the feeling which we might define as Love will eventually fill our lives. Feeling of Love will happen, it will chose us, we can't chose it because it is ambiguous to us.
So what if someone asks me "Do you love your spouse?". My answer is "please share your understanding of Love with me, then I can answer if I love my spouse, based on the parameters that make your definition of Love". I am sure I will get into a discussion that will either unleash the expressions captured in this post or make that person move out of this discussion with a "maverick" :).
So next time you are in a social gathering/setup and someone asks you "Do you Love your spouse?", what will be your answer?
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