Don’t Be Indifferent To Love, Be Brave

Sometimes, like just now, I’ll catch myself in all my urgency to be above something, to not care, to be ultimately indifferent. Such efforts are no more than the striving for control, however. The striving to be unaffected, immune, untouched by the deeper yearnings and complexities of any engaged existence. What a baffling endeavor.

If indifference is the opposite of love, how could I possibly be desirous of a quality so lacking in character, so inconsistent with my natural propensity?

What I’m questioning is this incompatibility, this shield I have tried to hold out in front of me. And, to protect me from what? My talent for feeling? It just doesn’t make sense that, if love is our strength, we would ever equate indifference with personal power. How can we actually believe ourselves when we say we aspire to love, if we so easily will hunger for the remedy that will enable us to not feel certain things,
that will enable us to numb out?

This is not charming or honorable. That’s what I’m realizing. Indifference is also not powerful, let alone empowering. To be indifferent might give us the veneer of importance, of being above this and better than that. But really, all it exemplifies is our cowering away, our closing off, our inability to handle the chasm between joy and grief.

To be indifferent is to sabotage our senses, and the degree and quality of senses greatly effects how alive we are in the world. I am discovering that there already is too much fear and too much fear, especially, surrounding love.

Because, to love is to discover ourselves. It is proof that we have shown up in life.

It would be shameful to resist this. What I’m thinking is if we are capable of love, if we are comfortable with selfless self-expression, then we must lead with it.

We must honor that we are one of the few who can go there. We must hold love out as an intention. We must be willing to live with sincerity and amazement, vulnerable to hurt, pain, and abandonment, and we must do so with the absence of fear. Rather than investing ourselves with indifference, we must brave our feelings. We must give in to feeling it all.