funny how
heel and toe, thyself
Jogging up the stairs through a fresh afternoon breeze past which all I can hear is shredding treetops, dense with roaring leaves, the wind pouring through and through and through them, a movement: a little hand catches my eye. A little furry hand, neat grey, ending in claws, extended past the upholstered arm of the couch, the rest of its owner snuggled away in couch’s lap. The hand is the size of my thumb and I know in whom it ends. This little girl is luxuriously cleaning and grooming herself, rounding the corner I see her toes stretch out hard in an ecstasy and then contract. She doesn’t think, it’s such a beautiful afternoon. Should I really be lying here all day just licking myself? I haven’t got a thing done since this morning. I think she’s thinking, Mmmmm.
There is something about statements like “love yourself” that really puts me off. I think my first reaction is “stop telling me what to do”. Then there is “what makes you think that I don’t?” since such messages come to me via people who don’t know me. And as I search for more explanations for my reaction I think “there are so many different undersandings of words like “love” that I don’t know what this particular message means (be obsessed with myself? be infatuated with myself? unconditionally accept myself?) and I don’t even know whether the person with the gratuitous advice/ instruction even knows what they mean. Then I think “Make Love Not War” isn’t all that different and that’s a statement that has never offended me.
Just love, do not ask the why or wherefore. And many of us do not love ourselves enough. Loving yourself doesn’t mean being self-centred. It means accepting you self and being comfortable with yourself – thereby freeing you to love others!
I love your poetic description of your holding hands with your little friend!
Thank you, Steve. I love how you say it frees us to love others.
Adrian, I agree, ‘love’ does not seem to work well as an instruction. They say God says, love one another: and look how well that panned out.
Maybe it works better as a beckoning, a kind of invitation?
I go through pretty much the same progression of defiance, mutinous rejection, confusion, self-questioning & examining of the word love when I’m told “love yourself”. It often feel patronising. I don’t like being told to “Smile!” And I don’t think many women do – it feels like, you’re my property, you’re an object, I have a right to direct your actions. But this “love yourself” had been cut out of a piece of denim and stashed down the side – with helpfully hung safety pin – of a mounted map at the entrance to a national park. The looping handwriting, the glitter. For some reason that made me like it.
I think that a lot of the problems that people have with “love” is semantical in nature. We have several words and expressions for love-like feelings in English – Like, Adore, Love, be attached, the rock-song erotic “lerve” – and we confuse them. I interpret the injunction to “love yourself” to be a suggestion that a person should apply the same pure love that the Greeks called (and still call) by the name “agape” to oneself. This is the kind of love that St Paul referred to in his letter to the Corinthians. In the King James Version, the word is rendered as “charity”, probably to avoid confusion with other types of love. We still remember this in the expression “Faith, Hope and Charity”. But Charity now means something else, so the word Love has been substituted. I am not religious, but I love this passage of the Bible: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres … And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”