One of the benefits of my new lease Subaru
is a few months of free Sirius XM satellite radio. I have had the radio set to 50’s on 5, so I have been listening to music from the 50’s for the last two months. I never heard any of this music when I was young as we didn’t have a radio and I was too young to care anyway. Once I was old enough to have a record player of my own, I was such a nerd that I purchased and listened to classical music, not contemporary music. Consequently much of this music I am listening to now is new to me. I have been deprived of the deep meaning and life lessons sung about back in the 50’s.
One song I heard recently that really struck me was “Everybody Loves a Lover” sung by Doris Day. The first time I heard it, it seemed fluffy and rather narcissistic. But after hearing it a couple more times I realized that it
revealed one of the deeper “meaning of life” messages. Here is the part I am talking about:
Everybody loves a lover
I’m a lover, everybody loves me …
I should worry, not for nothin’
Everybody loves me, yes they do
And I love everybody
Since I fell in love with you
Who’s the most popular personality?
I can’t help thinkin’ it’s no one else but me …
Everybody loves a lover
One way of understanding life is to see it as all happening on a scale of feeling that ranges from FEAR at the bottom to LOVE at the top, with all the other feelings in between. By FEAR I am not talking about the “run for your life” survival type fear, but
instead more of the “withdrawn from life and refusing to participate” type of fear. I represent this through the acronym for FEAR that says Failure to Embrace and Accept Reality. The reality that we refuse to accept is that everyone is different from us. Nobody wants to make us center and do things our way, which is doing things based on our values, concerns, and priorities. For some crazy reason they all seem to think that their concerns and priorities are more important than mine/ours. To us that makes life one big pot of crazy chaos – terrifying. Our way is comfortable and everything else is uncomfortable. This is where the concept of “comfort zone” comes from.
The opposite end of the spectrum is where we embrace and accept life in all its amazing complexity and difference from a state of deep respect and love. To do this requires some profound skills for participating with life. It requires humility and the ability to function effectively from vulnerability. It requires excellent boundaries and negotiation skills and a powerful sense of self esteem and self worth. Most of all it requires standing in acceptance of “what is” as perfect and purposeful just as it is yet ready to embrace change in every moment. Like I said – big time skills.
The song lyrics point out some of the interesting consequences of having those skills. People like individuals that demonstrate those skills. When you love life, life loves you back. Life tends to give you whatever you give it, like a mirror. If you are jealous and resentful all the time, people don’t like being around you. If you are angry you harvest boat loads of anger coming back at you. If you are fearful and separate, then people ignore you as you are not showing up. You might feel abandoned, but in reality you are the one that separated first because of your fear. What fear you ask? The fear of the chaos of difference.
Once you look closely at this kind of fear you begin to see that there is nothing inherently to be afraid of. It is not like a lion is jumping out at you and about to eat you. The fear is really your inner awareness that you are not functioning from a state of love. Is is your awareness that you are still functioning from a self centered state that believes that you should get things your way, and knowing that you won’t. The fear is knowing that you are living a lie that life just simply can’t support. Life is not about you. Your experience of life is all about you, but the rest of life – everything outside your skin – is not. The part of you that knows this goes into fear because it now says “holy crap, how am I going to get my needs met to survive if I am not entitled to get my way?” I believe this is the fear most people really experience.
This fear goes away when you develop the skills to get your needs met by participating with life in ways that people like and appreciate. Offering your ability to generate value by your specialized efforts in exchange for getting your needs met is the system that life supports. This is described by some authors as “win-win” interactions. You give value in exchange for value you receive. Value exchange is based on attraction, not demand. You have to be attracted to what others are offering and they have to be attracted to what you are offering. This fits my definition of LOVE – the willingness to participate in positive exchange. Love is not just a feeling, it is a specific type of action. Love that stays inside of you and does not define your actions may be very self soothing, but beyond that it has no meaning or value.
Another way of describing these skills is developing mature coping skills. Examples are altruism (living by the Golden Rule), the conversion of selfish needs and wants into behaviors that support society at large, the development of patience and optimism, and building the humor to not take oneself too seriously. These kinds of inner skills at converting base desires and needs into socially supportive behaviors that also support your own inner peace as well as ultimately get your needs met are the higher order skills that allow the free flow of love in your life.
So become a lover of life. This involves learning very challenging mental and social skills. It means embracing and accepting the chaos of difference. It means standing in humility and offering positive value based exchange with life. No one owes you anything and you are entitled to nothing. Life is what it is – accept it as it is. Nothing is ever “supposed” to be your way. It is your job to be your way, not anyone else’s. Be your uniqueness and figure out how to make it valuable to others. Let go of fear and become love.
Here is the song: