Most of my life I had no idea what unconditional love was. I hadn’t thought much about love in general. I knew my parents loved me, but many times it seemed conditional. The first time I thought I fell in love, I realized that we could only be in love if I was perfect in his eyes in all things, and I wasn’t. I learned from that the importance of being and doing what someone else expected of me. All that did for me is help me lower my self-esteem.
When my first baby was born, one night nursing him in the middle of the night, I realized what deep, true love really was. He was so little and so fully dependent on me. And I loved caring for him. I also realized at that moment how my mother must have felt about me, but she was never able to demonstrate it.
I went through life thinking I could find true love if only circumstances were different. If only I was prettier, if only I got better grades, if only I had a magnificent job, if only I married a doctor, if only I was shorter (I grew to six feet tall when I was in seventh grade). All of those if onlys didn’t help me a bit.
When I met Jacques, I learned so much more about love. He loved me just the way I was, and I loved him that way too. I discovered along the way that we developed what I consider now to be a bad habit of judging people, and when you are judging others, you really are judging yourself too, and I fell back into that “if only” place I thought I had left behind.
We were both teaching college, and we’d say if only our students would pay more attention or take their education more seriously. We both did lots of theatre and we were always complaining about actors not memorizing their lines or missing rehearsals. That judgement of others got in the way of us living our best lives.
I started learning about unconditional love from Ron. If I started to complain, he would say, wouldn’t it be better to do something positive about an issue than to get upset about it? That was hard for me at first, but I eventually realized that it is not my place to judge anyone else. When I learned that, the gateway began to open for me.
I finally started taking responsibility for myself. I stopped finding fault with others. That enabled me to make a huge shift. I started to love people for who they were. I choose to spend time with people I enjoy being with and I don’t judge them. And I don’t judge myself.
Why am I writing about all this right now? I have been observing the state of the world. So much of what is happening that is negative comes from judgement and hate. We could all learn from the song Hal David and Bert Bacharach wrote and Jackie DeShannon sang in the mid-sixties, What the World Needs Now:
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It’s the only thing there is just too little of . . . .
No not just for some, but for everyone.
Imagine what our world would be now if we all chose to love one another instead of judging them. What if we are all at the beginning of a huge shift in the world? We can be if choose to.
Start right now. Remember the deepest love you have experienced or that you would love to experience. How does that feel? Take that feeling and pay it forward. If you realize you are judging someone or something, forgive yourself, forgive whoever you need to, and then start spreading that beautiful, unconditional love. May it circulate all over the world and beyond.
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