There’s also the deep thirst to be loved and to love. The desire to understand ourselves and to understand life is a deep thirst. We expect and hope for something much better so we’ll feel less alone, less empty. We don’t know the cause it’s very vague, but that feeling of being empty inside is very strong. Sometimes we feel empty we feel a vacuum, a great lack of something. Out of this incomplete understanding of ourselves spring our illusory infatuations, which Nhat Hanh captures with equal parts wisdom and wit: When we learn to love and understand ourselves and have true compassion for ourselves, then we can truly love and understand another person. Often, we get crushes on others not because we truly love and understand them, but to distract ourselves from our suffering. Nhat Hanh points out the crucial difference between infatuation, which replaces any real understanding of the other with a fantasy of who he or she can be for us, and true love: Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss If we have happy parents, we have received the richest inheritance of all. Our parents may be able to leave us money, houses, and land, but they may not be happy people. If our parents didn’t love and understand each other, how are we to know what love looks like? … The most precious inheritance that parents can give their children is their own happiness. Echoing what Western developmental psychology knows about the role of “positivity resonance” in learning love, Nhat Hanh writes: If you don’t understand, you can’t love.Īnd yet because love is a learned “dynamic interaction,” we form our patterns of understanding - and misunderstanding - early in life, by osmosis and imitation rather than conscious creation. Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. That’s why to love means to learn the art of nourishing our happiness. When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love. The question then becomes how to grow our own hearts, which begins with a commitment to understand and bear witness to our own suffering: Illustration from Hug Me by Simona Ciraolo We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. He illustrates this mismatch of scales with an apt metaphor: (“Suffering” sounds rather dramatic, but in Buddhism it refers to any source of profound dissatisfaction - be it physical or psychoemotional or spiritual.) Understanding, after all, is what everybody needs - but even if we grasp this on a theoretical level, we habitually get too caught in the smallness of our fixations to be able to offer such expansive understanding. Thich Nhat HanhĪt the heart of Nhat Hanh’s teachings is the idea that “understanding is love’s other name” - that to love another means to fully understand his or her suffering. To receive his teachings one must make an active commitment not to succumb to the Western pathology of cynicism, our flawed self-protection mechanism that readily dismisses anything sincere and true as simplistic or naïve - even if, or precisely because, we know that all real truth and sincerity are simple by virtue of being true and sincere. Indeed, in accordance with the general praxis of Buddhist teachings, Nhat Hanh delivers distilled infusions of clarity, using elementary language and metaphor to address the most elemental concerns of the soul. That’s what legendary Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926–January 22, 2022) explores in How to Love ( public library) - a slim, simply worded collection of his immeasurably wise insights on the most complex and most rewarding human potentiality. Learning to meet this mystery with the full realness of our being - to show up for it with absolute clarity of intention - is the dance of life. And yet anyone who has ever taken this wholehearted leap of faith knows that love remains a mystery - perhaps the mystery of the human experience. What does love mean, exactly? We have applied to it our finest definitions we have examined its psychology and outlined it in philosophical frameworks we have even devised a mathematical formula for attaining it.
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