After the first two parts of this trilogy, I received a lovely email from a water engineer in Nanyuki. He talked about how excited he gets when a community gets access to water. He said that when there is no water, access is the most important thing. It’s only once access is secured, can the debate about water quality begin. He reasoned that love, was much the same.
Is it true many of us are so starved of basic love, that we’ll take anything that resembles it? Maybe the question I should be asking is how can something resemble love? Isn’t it obvious what’s love and what’s not?
In her book Milk and Honey, Rupi Kaur dedicates a short paragraph “to fathers with daughters.” She says that, “every time you tell your daughter you yell at her out of love, you teach her to confuse anger with kindness, which seems like a good idea, till she grows up to trust men who hurt her, ‘cause they look so much like you.”
Given that so many people end up marrying their opposite-sex parent, I found this interesting. Is it love when your partner tells you that going to a ladies event at the church is interfering with family time? Is it love when someone tells you that your new outfit makes you look like a pumpkin? Is it love when your sister borrows your things without asking?
With love, unlike water, it’s not actually about what’s happening around you. It’s about what’s happening inside you. You see, when you love yourself, attracting love isn’t actually that hard.
When you love yourself, when you value yourself, when you know that you are worthy of real love and respect, the other person will know that turning up say, an hour late to meet you, is simply not acceptable.
I like to play the game “What would Oprah do?” in this situation. Here is a successful woman with bags of self-respect and self-love, and no one is going to dare mess her around. Embodying Oprah means that suddenly, access simply isn’t good enough. Being yelled at, as Rupi Kaur talks about, doesn’t constitute love. It becomes very clear indeed that many of the things we may mistake for love, are simply boundary violations.
Once you get clear on these, whether they are physical, emotional or even spiritual, you know exactly what you’re really getting – and the other person needs to be held accountable. Otherwise, you’re going to be the one drinking contaminated water and getting sick.
Yes, water can boiled, water can be filtered, we can even put tablets in to remove the nasties, but if you have the option to choose good, clean, nourishing water off the bat, the question has to be, why wouldn’t you choose it?
That is self-love.
And once you figure that out, it’s amazing how everything else, in true accordance with The Law of Attraction, simply and magically, all figures itself out.
--
