Hope for a generation. What does that really mean? We continue on with the only way we know how, live our individual lives, find a career, have our own circle of friends, and find someone to marry. Eventually we discover this doesn’t solve our problems, doesn’t fulfil our needs. So we have children and we live through the hope that they will be able to fulfil the unfulfillable. All focus from ourselves gets diverted onto our children and the effect of this means they live under such intense pressure to achieve what we were unable to achieve in our own lives.
So much for unconditional love. It all seems to come down to ourselves. We’re so self focused that the love for our children is really about love for ourselves—what we need, what they can provide us, what needs can they fulfil of ours? So, what is love exactly?
Surely satisfaction and ultimate fulfilment comes down to love and selflessness. As a child love starts off so real and pure, palpable and achievable but gradually it gets watered down, it gets more and more compromised until you are faced with the reality that love is actually very hard to come by. The pure essence in today’s society and the whole topic of love becomes entirely cynical to the point where some people question its existence at all!
When I really try to think about the question of what is love I think love is the most natural force in human existence but on the other hand it’s the rarest. Why is that? How can we be so capable of love but so incapable of love at the same time? It truly does your head in. We are all so affected by our own experience of love that we just have to avoid the whole question because its all so damn hurtful and disappointing. I mean its just that sphere that you can’t go anywhere near, its frightening.
I guess that is why people turn to religion because they don’t get the love they are looking for in their everyday life. They have to search ‘out there’ for it. ‘God’ and Jesus is somewhere they can go to for love. Thank God for religion then. You can see what a comfort it is for people in a society so bereft of real love.
What is this discontentment in society about love? Such a powerful thing that we really know so little about. We claim to be the experts on so many subjects—science, technology, all the mechanical stuff, but where are the real answers to the real questions such as what is love? Surely those answers have to one day come into our realm of understanding as well as all the mechanistic subjects we have mastered. Surely all the knowledge we have accumulated has been for something? Surely it will bring answers to these great and meaningful questions.
Its so easy to feel depressed and negative about such issues but at the same time I hold a greater hope and trust that all the suffering and lack of love on our planet has been for a good reason. One day, eventually, we will be able to answer what surely has to be one of the most important and profound questions—what is love? Then we will be able to find our way back to love and deliver real hope to future generations.
Mary enjoyed growing up with a country lifestyle. She trained to be a nurse and now spends her time looking after her children while helping to run the family farm. Mary is spending time digesting the biological treatise put forward on the World Transformation Movement website by biologist Jeremy Griffith. It addresses the human condition and an essay titled What Is Love? answers that exact question. Mary also contributes to Wikipedia.