Here's a proposition to consider: In any given moment, we have a choice about how we respond to the world around us. We can live out of love or we can act out of fear. We can anchor our response to the happenings around us in tenderness and optimism, or we can live in a more hollow and grasping place of negativity and anger.
If our intention is to add a healing helping of love to the world, the answer is obvious. We need to ally ourselves with the forces that hold all of us up rather than smack us down. We need to keep close to kindness and tenderness and patience and care. We need to climb out of our small-mindedness and into a sense of greater community with the world around us. We need to stay rooted in our deepest loves, and we need to act in love on behalf of everyone around us.
This sounds so obvious when written in a tidy paragraph like the one I've just offered. And yet this can sometimes feel like the hardest job in the world. When we’re overwhelmed or off-balance, our grasping habits move front and center. When we're surrounded by negativity, we can be easily pulled down into our own grumbly space. When we feel buffered by life's fiercer winds, we can lose touch with our innate wisdom and friendliness. We can almost feel the doors and windows of our heart slamming shut.
Acting out of lovingkindness, then, must be a choice we make moment-by-moment, as we move through our days. It can be a practice, an attitude and ultimately a way of being in the world. It can be a beautiful way to keep our eyes trained on healing ourselves and the world, and it can teach us where our lives are flowing and where we are stuck.
Here's a simple strategy that may help us move in that direction: When you face a decision, when you're struggling with how to respond, when you're trying to figure out what to do next, whisper these two words: Choose love. And then act accordingly, responding in whatever way you feel adds to the world's bounty of love and care. This will be easy, of course, when we're feeling happy and abundant and open. And it will take a little practice when the road grows a little more bumpy.
Choosing a less enlightened path hurts, after all. Maligning another doesn’t help anyone and it doesn’t feel good to us. Trying to keep track of who we like and who we don’t takes time and energy. Remembering which grudge we are holding against whom takes energy that could be more productively spent in raising us up. Holding tight to stories about how we have been wronged and why only reinforces our sense of despair.
"I have decided to stick with love," Martin Luther King, Jr., once wrote. " Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
Today and every day, why not open wide our hearts and our arms, and ally ourselves with everyone and everything, choosing the side of light? How can we possibly go wrong with more love?
As you explore this lovely and simply instruction, watch closely to what happens. Do the words "choose love" jolt you out of a rut and into a more enlightened way of being in the world? Do they convince you to abandon those harsh words in favor of a sweeter retort? And how do you feel when you are able to follow through in this way?
And when you just can’t muster up the most loving response (which happens to us all from time to time), when ill-will rears its angry head instead, why is that? And what happens? And what can we do in our lives to make it more likely that we can err on the side of love in the future?
In all the days ahead, let’s choose love - in happiness and in sorrow, in joy and in despair. Let's invite our words and actions to be a beacon of love and understanding, lighting the way for others. Let's lay down the burdens of hate and ill-will. And let's open our arms and welcome in the whole wide world.
Thank you Claudia- so very true about the useless energy to hold on to grudges. Life is too short and precious.
We were just talking about this earlier today! Thank you, Claudia, for once again, reminding us to “choose love.” ❤️