I keep thinking about ‘love’. I don’t mean thinking about it all the time, as in every moment of everyday, but over the years I keep coming back to it.
What is love? How do we define it? What are our expectations of it and where do these expectations come from? How do we tell if we are ready for love?
How do we measure love? How do we actually ‘love’ or know if we are doing it? Do we need love, or can we live it's absence? If we can live without love, is it healthy to do so?
Are the answers to our questions on love found in books, in meditation or thought? Are they found in solitude, or with others? Are the answers personal, shared, or communal answers? Are they discovered though dialogue or through experience?
Is love like modern conceptual art?- where the idea of the piece is often better than the realisation. Is love a destination or the journey? Is love clichéd and all that Hollywood tells us it is or should be? Is love a koan? whereby the meaning is accessible by intuition rather than reason (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dan).
Is love an ideal, something we can never attain, but keep striving for? Is love bigger than everything else, a concept so huge that we cannot begin to understand or make sense of it?
Is love what we make of it?
Is love what we allow it to be, what we give shape and context to?
Is love an extension of ourselves,
an expression?
Is it imbued within us from birth, or created by us as we engage with the world?
Are we ‘love’?
Click on this link to take you to " 'expectations' thoughts on love pt 2 (August 2010)"
Click on this link to take you to " 'expectations' thoughts on love pt 2 (August 2010)"
Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, (love) is not pompous, it is not inflated,
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it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury,
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it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth.
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It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
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4 Love never fails. If there are prophecies, they will be brought to nothing; if tongues, they will cease; if knowledge, it will be brought to nothing.
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For we know partially and we prophesy partially,
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but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.
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When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things.
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At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.
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5 So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Love
Michael in Sydney