Strange love

Self-love is a dangerous proposition.

If it is true that the Millennials have it in their nature to put self-love above all else, such as respect for tradition or their elders or their country, it is the result of the great struggle of the many generations ahead of them, from Mary Ann Evans pretending to be George Elliot in the late 1800s in order to be taken seriously as a novelist to Madonna defying customs, religion, gender norms, sexual restrictions in the 1980s to practice what she continues to preach 30 years into such an illustrious career—“Express Yourself.”

But don’t kid yourself. Even in this age of instant gratification and self-entitlement, self-love is no mean feat. It doesn’t come easy, even to those we judge to be so #blessed. There is just too much suffering in the world. We cannot even attempt to half understand how we each suffer and yet we are quick to judge: How can he be so unhappy in his corner office? So many people are jobless. How can she complain about how unmanageable time has become? She doesn’t even have children to raise.

I don’t know why some people think they know exactly what it takes to be happy that if one had money or one had a loving partner or one had healthy children or one had parents who could help make one’s dreams come true these people tend to devalue one’s struggles as well as one’s successes, consider one petty or frivolous, ungrateful or overambitious should one express a need for more of life. The whole romance of the “starving artist” archetype, for instance, seems to suggest that poverty, misery, sorrow, dire circumstances, even insanity are necessary ingredients in the making of a great artist. Is Damien Hirst less of an artist now that he is a billionaire, the world’s richest living artist right now? Does Stephen King have to be as hopeless as Edgar Allan Poe, who died in the streets owning nothing, not even the shirt on his back, to gain the respect of the cognoscenti?

Does despair or discontent or desolation have to be justified? When I am dissatisfied with my food, must I always think of hunger in Africa? It’s like envy in reverse: I envy you that you have a heavier cross to bear than I do. I am jealous of your suffering. I will never know pain the way you know it. My life has been so easy compared to yours I have no right to be other than happy.

And yet, I’m not, not always, but is anyone out there always happy? Not the clowns, for sure, not Buddha, not even Jesus when He was on earth. Sometimes, happiness seems to be a brief interruption of what otherwise feels like an empty, challenging, difficult, pointless journey.

Back in my teens, I used to think life was a blank canvas filled with splashes of light. Strangely, I was okay with it. I identified with the melancholic spirits of my time, the angry musings of The Smiths or The Cure, the forlorn sensibilities beneath all that synth and robotic sound of Depeche Mode, the tortured soul of The Church, Echo and the Bunnymen, and Joy Division, maybe even the rage of The Clash and Green Day, and the longing and melancholy of OPM, the Filipino ballads that ruled the airwaves of my youth.

Decades later, as I began to dabble in New Age philosophies and meditation, I decided that my life was a white canvas sprinkled with black ink that sometimes cascaded down the surface like tears. The shift in perspective might have made me happ(ier), but not much has changed, except the way I look at it.

What emerged from one soul-deep, 15-minute meditation one night in those years I was seeking for happiness in the practices of Buddhism, in the tenets of my Catholic faith, in the understanding of some Islamic truths, in the words of the likes of Deepak Chopra, Neil Donald Walsh, and Andrew Matthews was not happiness but a sort of acceptance. I learned, for instance, that hate was not the opposite of love. It is, like annoyance or dislike or distrust or prejudice, a variation of fear, which is love’s true opposite. The answer to our unhappiness is not happiness, but acceptance or faith, the acceptance that life is the way it is and we just live it the best way we can and all experiences, good or bad, bright or dark, from which no one is exempt, kings and paupers, beauties and beasts, smart and stupid, the healthy and the sick, the sophisticates and the hoi polloi, are just part of the story of humanity.

And then I learn, little by little, to love myself more, but not at the expense of the others around me. I learn to appreciate the constant emptiness, knowing—or claiming—that it serves the same purpose by which bread crumbs led two lost children back home in the Brothers Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel. It is also thanks to this view on emptiness that I have a better appreciation of giving of myself, seeing it now not only as a sharing of my surplus, but as a form of emptying myself out because it is only when we are empty or half full or saddled with a sense of emptiness that we continue to search, which is what our soul is here on earth for.

There must be a reason our soul is like air, shapeless, boundless, ageless, a kind of nothingness, the better to accommodate all that is possible in a vessel the size of the entire universe.

With all these learnings, I find a connection between us, no matter how far removed we are from each other, no matter how different our paths are, no matter how varied the roles we play. We are all souls playing the game of life—or maybe we are all bits and pieces of the same eternal soul playing almost eight billion characters (and counting) tasked to learn, to know, to experience the full range of being human.