How to love
Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk and author of many books including How to Love, died in January. Just when I needed him most.
I’d been zigzagging through life, from one overcorrection to the next. Everything I did felt either irrationally rash, or overly cautious.
After my dog died, I scoured the internet for a puppy that could make my heart whole. I found one in Kansas—dropped everything and drove there in a snowstorm—only to re-home the pup a week later because I needed another eye surgery. I booked a silent retreat, but then cancelled because of new Covid fears. My hopes for the latest and greatest new guy failed to come true, so I packed my calendar. Then cancelled most of those plans.
Thank goodness for the vitrectomy surgery!
Most people think spending four days in face-down recovery would be torture. But in that stillness—with only the healing job to do—I was the most comfortable I’d been in a long time.
For nearly 100 hours, my face was nested in a foam cradle. I hunched in a massage chair or lay on my belly with my head at the foot of the bed. Sometimes, I watched tiny TV on my phone. Or listened to a book on tape. With no pressure to speak or to write, I was mostly silent and still. I had permission from the universe to relax.
And then.
My eye healed, and I got busy again. I searched for another puppy. Researched beach retreats. Swiped left and right in earnest.
I reread How to Love.
It seems that’s what I do whenever I want love, have love, fear love, or am tempted to give up on love—which is pretty much every day of the week.
After all these years of reading and rereading, what could I— what could we?—learn that’s new?
First, a refresher. The book boils down to four “simple” things.
1. You can only love another when you feel true love for yourself.
2. Love is understanding.
3. Understanding brings compassion.
4. The way to show love is through deep listening and loving speech.
This time, I didn’t skip ahead for tips on understanding, compassion or deep listening skills.
Instead, step one stopped me in my tracks! Did it also stop you? Clearly I’m no expert, but Thich Nhat Hanh is.
What if, in the rush to solve our problem or find our person, we’re spending too little time on that first simple-not-simple thing?
What if we’ll never find the peace we seek with another until we first understand and love the weird and barely comprehensible human who already lives in our heart?
Every person is a world to explore, wrote Thich Nhat Hanh.
So I’m going to start with myself.
