Loving Language: Part 1: The meaning of Love

Loving Language: Part 1: The Meaning of Love

Language and in particular the nature of language has always played a very important part of my life. I have naturally been studious about words and the definition of words and above all things, the usage or perhaps to put it more accurately, the mis-usage of language.

As I have got older, I have become more and more aware of how abused the English language has become. There are so many people out there who have no real conscience of even a consciousness of what comes out of their mouth. I have suffered very deeply because of this. I have had so many people in my life speak to me in a rather upsetting way.

There are so many people in our lives that we claim to love. We say "I love you" to our parents, grand-parents, children, grand-children, aunties, uncles, nephews, nieces, husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends and sometimes even just friends, but how many of us actually know what love is? Let's look at what "love" really means.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there are no less than 5 different definitions of the word "love".

1). A strong feeling of affection.

2). A strong feeling of sexual linked with sexual affection.

3). A great interest and pleasure in something.

4). A persoin of thing that one loves.

5). (in tennis, squash etc) a score of zero.

The last definition is one that is reserved for racket sports so I wont go into any details about it as it explains itself quite clearly, however, the rest of the definitions may feel rather vague to some people so lets try it make sense of them.

The first 2 definitions use the word "affection". Affection is a synonym for love and romance. There are many others we can add like "passion", "compassion" and "warmth". So "love" can be any words in one. The forth definition refers to the usage of the word "love" as a noun, for example,"My love" or "Your love".

At a deeper level, we realise that all of the 5 definitions above could have been definitions for other words. Definitions 1 and 4 could have been a definition for "warmth" while definition 2 could been for "attraction" and definition 3 could have been for "passion".

After reading all this, you might be asking yourself "Isn't there an easier way to understand what love really is?" Well personally, I believe that there is an easier way to understand what love is.

To put it simply, love is about positive emotion. When we "love" someone, something or some activity, it means that the subject in question is giving us positive emotion.

This for me is the real meaning of love. Positive emotion.

"Life is too short": What does it mean?

Life is too short: What does it mean?

Misunderstanding

A quick confession. If you told me what "life is too short" meant before this month (October 2017) I would have interpreted it in a very bad way. I would have confused the term for something like "your life will end shortly". The difficulty I have always had with phrases is that they are just a short way of saying something that often needs to be explained in depth in order for it to be understood properly.

However, this month I have received the November 2017 edition of the American Buddhist magazine, "Lion's roar" and it explained everything in a beautiful and touching way and in a way where everything simply made sense. To put it simply, we are impermanent. If we look at our lives carefully, a lot of us have a habit of clinging on to something and try to give it a feeling of permanence. this is an illusion that we like to give ourselves. We try to hold on to life even though we know deep down that it will all come to an end one day.

Mental Baggage

Throughout our lives,we are given both by ourselves and by other people different names, identities. personalities, titles and other descriptions of the self. However, when we are born, none of these things existed. When we are born, we were just a being. That was literally all we were. Just a sentient being. Just something that breathes and moves. There was no version, definition or perception of us. We were just ... well.. us. As life progresses and we get older and get more attuned to the world, we are given "Mental baggage" from other people. We are told that we are this, that and the other, that we have this,that and the other and that we can or cannot or even will or will not be this, that and the other.

Here is the poem that i discovered in the final page before the back cover of the magazine mentioned above. I love this poem, because it helps us realise the purity of being.

I Knew You Before

by Karen Maezen Miller

I knew you before were a victim

before you were a wreck, a mess, and a bomb.

Without a crowning success or crippling failure.

Before you had an issue, an axe, or a cross.

No disorder ,no syndrome, no label-

undiagnosed,

without a blemish or scar.

Before that night and the morning after,

before the fall, the crash, the crime,

without an upgrade or makeover.

Version 0.0

No story,

no narration, no closed captioning,

no footnotes and no bonus features,

before you remembered to forget and forgot to remember.

I knew you before you were what you say-

what you think,what you fear, what you know.

Do you know yourself before?

The one thing that came to my attention when reading this poem was that this is the way we were when we were born. without any agendas. This is also the way we will be when we die. Without agendas. When we die, all conceptualisation of ourselves will cease. In other words, when we die, we are free from concepts and we are just who we were when we are born. Empty. Empty of concepts. We came into the word with nothing an we leave the world with nothing.

Equality in death.

A friend of mine told me that death is the ultimate equaliser. When we are dead, we are all the same. No one is superior or inferior to any other person when we all die, because superiority and inferiority are both concepts of the mind. Therefore, death is a liberator that makes us return to our true self. Once we realise all this about death, we lose our need to hold on to life and we can live our life to the full.

Moral of the story: Live your life! Live your dreams! Don't be overwhelmed by what life throws at you! Don't listen to your doubters, your haters our you criticisers.

I will leave you with Prince EA.

EVERYBODY DIES, BUT NOT EVERYBODY LIVES.

Decisions,Un-decisions and Re-decisions

Decisions, Un-decisions and Re-decisions

In my own personal life, making decisions is a very hard and sometimes even a painful process. I often spend months, even years working out wherever a certain decision is good for me or not.

The thing that makes the decision-making process even worse for me is that when I finally have made a decision, it often gets challenged and questioned by other people.There are time when I am told to re-think ore even change me decision . This is very annoying  for me as I often take a ling time to make decisions for me as I often take a ling time to make decisions in the first place. One thing for sure is that if I am not allowed to make my own decisions at the age of 31 the there is something seriously wrong with the society that I live in.

I've realised now trust sometimes you have to trust your own heart when it comes to your own decisions. If it doesn't feel right, the it probably isn't.

I have spent the most recent years of my life being encouraged to re-think and undo certain decisions. In the end, I eventually do what my heart tells me to do. The mind can be a great tool for making rational decisions but when it comes to emotional well being, your heart is your teacher and director. I think I need to balance mind-orientated thinking with what the heart tells me. 

When you make decisions, do you listen to your mind or your heart? Here is American spiritual teacher Ram Dass who gives his thoughts in this lecture.