Love, Love, Love

I recently started going to therapy, once every two weeks, with a therapist who seems to be relatively young and inexperienced but with an ample amount of good intention and a developed faculty for listening. She is a good person.

I do not find the sessions to be helpful for attacking emotional or personal issues; I have processed almost everything, and all that I have not processed I know exactly how. I can trace every fault of mine to the root, understand how that root was sown, and how to sever that root (or make it more bearable). I treat our sessions as time for me to ask about how humans work and as an implicit sounding board for my own ideas.

I asked her, "Is it normal for people to section off people as friends only in specific contexts?" She said yes, and she brought up the idea of a concentric circle of friendship: the people on the outside rings you only speak to for coffee, and all the interior rings progress into more depth of contact.

But how could I claim to be a friend with someone only in X context? Attention to another is not divisible. Believing such is a self-servicing platitude.

Love is the third most beautiful word. God is love and love alone, so he left us with the structures of the universe. It is far more honest to say, "I love all that God has created" than it is to say, "I love God". The former is rooted in universal justice, the latter is drenched in convenience. This is no different in our love for man. This is no different in our friendships with man.

Friendship of this nature is a beautiful thing, and it might be a miracle. It is a miracle. Life as a human being is a strange and painful one, and the brain can't help but characterize pain and strife as more significant than pleasure and joy. Every man who leaves his house for the day only thinks of his goals to achieve, not the fact that anyone, at any moment, could strike him dead as he walks past them. The fundamental orientation of being human is that of a hopeful child. That is why suffering can brand the soul and destroy the brain. That is why true friendship is a miracle: the reduced now is seen as whole.

Love in the universal justice for the other is a rare thing, and often against human nature. This is why the ultimate advice of the legendary book "How To Win Friends and Influence People" was simply to see the other person and be genuinely interested in them and their life.

The belief that you can only see someone as a convienence hinges on a singular utilitarian premise: if no harm is done to either party, then sectioning off people is morally fine.

The orientation of our actions carry a significant, if not equal, weight to our actions. This is why a pastor once told me, "You can tell when someone is being dishonest": he implicitly understood this fact. I was young and tired of hearing someone who had never been destroyed by affliction claim he could read human nature from the pulpit. So I told my brother I was going to test his premise. I spoke to the pastor in full dishonesty but with a genuine orientation that somehow what I said was true, and his only remarks for my grandmother were, "That is an incredible young man." This is why the words "I love you" can mean either nothing or everything.

Our orientation of being towards the other is an overlooked unit of moral calculus.