Love vs. Loving
Everybody likes to talk about love, but very little people actually want to talk about being loving. Can one really truly love when the actions are consistently unloving?
I started this inquiry by looking for the definition of loving on the internet. Interesting enough, other than getting something general like: Feeling or showing love or great care, I don’t see anything remotely describing the specific of what the acts of being loving means. More precisely, most articles and definitions go into the details closely associating loving as result of love. But is love really necessary to being loving toward another? Or vise versa; are those people who love by default practices being loving toward their love ones?
Base on my observations and my own experience, I actually don’t think love translates to loving. As matter of fact, I have seen enough people who appear to truly love another, yet their actions and words consistently hurt another to know that this is not true. I believe while love is a state of mind, loving is a way of being and a habit.
As a habit, through watching how people around us act, we learned to treat people a certain way and talk to people a certain way. A trained loving person doesn’t “think” about needing to act lovingly just as an unconscious harsh person doesn’t “think” about needing to act cruel; they just do. A loving person seems to have a natural tendency of finding something kind and encouraging to say even in the worst of a situation vs. most other seems to have a kin ability to find something negative to comment on regardless how great a situation may be. A trained loving person naturally have the habit of treating people around them with kindness, respect, courtesy, generosity and compassion instead of the habit of showering people with their righteous critiques, negative name calling and harsh tones and voices periodically. A loving person also seems to have a constant awareness of the power of their words and their actions and the impacts their words and action may have on others. They consistently choose to use their words and actions wisely as a tool to connect rather than a weapon to dominate, justify and destroy. When they are
around, there is an undeniable sense of gentleness, warmth and a safe space created where people feel they are accepted and understood. It is no wonder that people love to hang around them!
So why do some people who love able to also consistently act lovingly yet most others who love found themselves consistently act cruel? When I took a closer look, it seems love have nothing to do with it. Rather, it depends on whether we are properly trained
and whether we have a loving role model that helps shape our habits of interacting with others or not. For the lucky few who have been taught, demonstrated and learned through their environment to practice being loving, it has become their personality; they are able to treat people lovingly regardless whether they know them well or not; for the most trained one, in many incidences they didn’t even have to like the person to be loving toward them! This is profound! For the rest of us, we were left to figure it out for ourselves. Without actively discovering and re-creating our habits, most of us end up acting and reacting just like our parents and our close environment; monkey-see; monkey do.
I wish I can say I am a trained loving person; but I can’t. As matter of fact while some parts of being loving comes naturally to me like respecting others, being courteous and not calling other negative names, I really struggle with being generous and being compassionate sometimes. It’s easier to resent and withhold then to forgive and be generous. While I am able to tone down and reduce my habit of being righteous through years of retraining, I still catch myself getting irritated when people don’t do what I
suggest. I admire those who have learned and master the art of being loving toward everyone. Not only I want to be like them; I want to be around them (for the obvious reason).
As I continue to catch myself and retraining myself, I hope one day I will also be able to declare myself a master at being loving and attract more loving people into my life. Even though, I failed many times, I’m not giving up. It just seems more exciting to learn how to be a person who lives and breathe giving lights to others than someone who by default adding darkness into others’ live. Isn’t it?