This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.
Love has its do's and don'ts. Love has its techniques and necessary elements, such as honesty and respect. In addition, there is also an art to loving. Eric Fromm wrote a classic little book on The Art of Loving almost sixty years ago. But his wisdom about what it takes to be a loving person is timeless.
An art has to be practiced to be of any value. That includes the practice of the art of loving. Dr. Fromm maintained that the practice of loving had five basic requirements, not unlike the practice of any other art, from carpentry to medicine.
The first requirement is discipline. You cannot become proficient at most anything if you do not practice it in a committed, disciplined way. Loving is not a matter of being "in the mood" but of developing habitual, functional ways of treating loved ones. Love may not appear to be a discipline, yet when you truly love another, you want your love to matter to, and to be effective for the other. Your commitment alone warrants the establishment of a daily regime of loving behavior.
The discipline loving generates prompts us to discipline our entire lives as well, so that all that we say or do will be consistent with and harmonious to our loving. If we do not have a need to make our lives congruent with our loving, we are not yet truly loving. When we truly love enough, we will discover an earnest desire to make our daily life congruent with that love.
The second requirement is concentration. As simple as it may sound, you cannot do more than one thing well at a time. That certainly includes loving. In our frantic culture, where our time and attention get so readily divided, it is all the more difficult to give a loved one our full, undivided concentration. Don't underrate the importance of giving your full attention.
To concentrate means to live fully in the present, to be fully present. Such concentration on a loved one as part of the practice of loving can lead to discoveries about who that person really is and what that person needs and wants.
The third requirement is patience. Loving, like any art, takes time to learn. It may well take an entire lifetime to fully develop your skills and understanding. Impatience is a sign of immaturity and selfishness. You need to practice willingness and to overcome willfulness. Love is a spiritual life form between persons, and it grows and must be nurtured at its own, organic pace.
The fourth requirement is supreme concern. You need to become supremely concerned that you master the art of loving. This is true for any art: you must desire to do it supremely well. You simply mustn't give up until you master this, the most important thing you are here to learn, to love well.
The fifth requirement is faith. You need to have faith in yourself, faith in the loved one, and faith in love. To have faith in yourself means to believe you can love and learn to be effective at loving. To have faith in the loved one means to believe that this person will receive and respond to your loving. To have faith in love means to believe in love's power, even though it may not reach or affect every person.
It takes courage to risk faith, and to have courage you must have inner strength. Nothing strengthens you like having succeeded even once at loving.
The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?
"Love" - Google News
September 20, 2020 at 07:00PM
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Love has its dos and donts - Patch.com
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