Love everyone.
It’s so obvious.
We intend to do it. We intend to be loving.
We intend to be kind and gentle and peaceful.
We mean well. We’re sincere.
Then we get irritable.
Or worse, we get angry.
And even worse than regular-angry, we also become enraged, either at someone in our life, or at someone we don’t even know. Maybe even a lot of someones we don’t know.
How can we love everyone when we’re raging at so many of them?
Do we override our anger? Our feelings? Our beliefs?
How we love people who are entirely unlovable?
“Loving everyone” is a challenge when we’re enraged at someone, and when their actions may very well be rage-worthy. We don’t feel the love. At all.
And it’s a big challenge in the case of someone who’s not very lovable.
Or is entirely unlovable.
I mean, some people aren’t even likable, never mind lovable.
Plus, it’s a lot easier to love people from a distance. It’s more the idea of love than the action of love.
It’s easier to love someone who’s homeless or is destitute, for example, from a distance—someone whose circumstances are so, so different from our own.
Philosophically we love the homeless person or the destitute person. Up close, well that requires a whole different kind of involvement. That requires being around someone we may not relate to at all. We have little to say, we don’t know what to ask them, we don’t know where to sit, or how to act. We probably feel uncomfortable, even guilty, around them.
So what do we do then? Do we pity the homeless and the destitute? Do we avoid them while simultaneously advocating for their rights?
Is this love? Is it sympathy? What is it?
Respect, relatability, opinions, loathing… and loving everyone
But let’s say the chasm isn’t so wide—let’s say it’s not a giant leap between someone who sleeps on a bench or in an alley… and someone who lives in a house or an apartment.
Suppose we’re talking about someone whose income is a lot lower than our own, and that just feels awkward.
Or whose income is much, much higher, and that also feels awkward. Plus, maybe their views seem awful to us because their income seems obscene and greedy to us.
Suppose it’s someone whose education level isn’t the same as ours and we can’t really relate.
Or maybe we’re talking about someone whose politics we loathe. Or whose religion or opinion about fill-in-the-blank is altogether terrible to us.
What then?
How do we love the people we feel nothing in common with and may not like at all or be comfortable around?
What about those we vehemently dislike, or even oppose?
Do we still love these people?
Is it really love if we can’t stand them? If we don’t want to be around them, even for legitimate reasons?
Can we love these people, even from a distance?
So maybe this is what loving everyone is…
I’m wondering if this is what love really is: respecting every human on a deep, deep level, simply as a matter of breathing in and out on the same planet.
Not respect based on what they do or where they’ve gone to school or what they’ve achieved or how much money they do or don’t make or what they talk about or how they think.
Not pity or head-tilting sympathy for someone’s unlucky circumstances, experience, or situation in life.
But just because we respect someone else’s humanness.
Face-to-face, human-to-human respect for someone who’s breathing in and out on the planet.
Could this be what love is?
Not a feeling, but gut-to-gut recognition
Not a feeling, not pity, not sympathy, not earned or based on likability or lovability.
A gut-to-gut recognition of a fellow soul having a human journey at the same time we are.
Of every human as a fellow soul on a human journey.
Could this be what love is?
Could it be this basic?
This simple?
If so, what do we even do with this?
