negative love is not hate

The existence of this thought took me at least a decade to see in blood.  It is a trait more prevalent among parents, but it is seen in all types of relationships.  The reason why negative love is so hard to see sometimes is because it is one of those shadowy ideas that don't become obvious until they become a distant memory.

A lot of people today have a hard time dealing with emotions.  Our world has evolved into a very rational and modern society. A lot of us believe that you can perfectly explain every occurence in this world through some sort of mathematical or hypothetical logic. Some schools of thought believe that our emotional nature is some sort of flaw or byproduct on the way to evolving to think. Everyone tries to predict wars, world series, presidential elections in some sort of statisical way.  One reason why these things dont always work is because it completely ignores people's tendency to be emotional. And in today's vocabulary, emotional and irrational are closley associated.

So, for some people a way to not look irrational is to launder their emotional self onto others.  Pyschologists like to call this transferrence. We use our pent up feelings of disappointment, sadness, and anger onto others to dissapate the pain. Some people blow up often and some are more explosive. This is the negative of negative love.

The love part of negative love is seen in the basic intent of the relationship. Parents want to give their children a good life, friends want to help each other out, mentors want to pass on  knowledge to his students. And for most people there needs to be a reason or something unique about a person to maintain that relationship. Parents see hope in their children, friends usually have something in common, mentors choose worthy students.

We choose who we love, who we give attention to, who we share our money with, but we also need a reason to share ourselves with you. And at the end of the day, most of us just want to help you become better. So the combination of the negative and the love leads to some very confusing moments.

There are many people who deal only with negative love. They expect perfection, everything you do can be better, and you begin to wonder if they even care for you. The longer the pattern exists, the longer the thoughts of dissent grow. Only if you can disembed yourself from the moment, can you realize that that person chose you for a reason. And in a weird way, they are showing that they actually have hope in you because if they didnt, they wouldn't waste their time on you. The intent and the action have such opposing flavors, but when we think back on the relationship can we finally see the love.

Negative love is when the moment is negative and evolves into love as a memory.  

pop culture smiles

The more that you experience in this world, there is something that you will realize. You realize that life is difficult for everyone who walks into this plane of existence. You realize that no matter how much or how little money you have or the number or lack of friends will be able to change that basic fact of life. It is the first noble truth of buddhism. The only reason why you may not think that life is not suffering is because that is what society lets you to think. Pop culture happiness is rooted in material symbols of worth. Having something that someone else does not provides a way of giving meaning to some moments and few lives.

Many decades ago there existed a sage, Henry Louis Mencken, who defined wealth as earning a hundred dollars more than your wife's sister husband. This idea is how society allows people to feel happy. They allow you to compare yourself to someone below you on the social ladder and everytime you purchase something it lets you experience that sensation a new again and the only way to feel that feeling again is to keep purchasing something bigger and better. This also happens to be the definition of an addiction and that feeling of satisfaction lasts as long as the downward comparison is new.

Some may ask, "even if its wrong to compare, does it not still feel good?" The answer is yes, the perspective of a comparison does feel good, but the point is that the feeling of that moment does not last. Its the same reason why everyone talks about Mona Lisa's smile. Everytime you start moving your eyes away from the painting, it seems as though Mona Lisa is starting to smile. We keep looking back to see if the smile is still there, which is the same as today's pop culture smile. A new purchase and a new comparison down feels like a smile but as soon as we look back on it, happiness is usually not there.

Imagine being stranded on a deserted island, would the size of your house, the type of car you drove, the brand of clothing you are wearing even matter? The reason why it does not matter, is that you would no longer have the ability to see and compare yourself to society. You would not have a measure to compare yourself against and no longer have a method to get your easy fix of happiness.

A brand of happiness that tends to last for longer is comparing yourself to your parents. Have you ever asked yourself if you are happier than your parents? Is that not the dream of every parent? To give their child a life of experiences that allows an extension of their soul to be happier then themselves? Most of us are better off financially than our parents, but the happiness of this generation does not reflect that. Are you happier than your parents?

 

weird dream..

I dreamt that i was in a mall walking around trying to find my family. I walked around lost and then finally sit down on the ground and start using my computer. I then notice and start talking to some random guy that has an assortment of shotguns. He then pulls one out and shoots a crowd. I don't even seem to care. I sit there just watching the guy shoot his gun. As all the people are running away.. they all run out of the mall to get away from the crazy man with a gun, but eventually a group of kids start running at this guy and overwhelm him by taking him down. The guy starts struggling trying to hit the kids and prevent them from taking him down. I notice how he tries to shoot the kids and hurt them and then I feel bad and guilty. I then run up to the guy b/c I am behind him and start beating him down. And somehow I have a bat and kill this guy because I want to save the kids..

and then i wake up... at first it seems as though i am crazy... but from a pyschotherapy perspective it might mean... so the mall seems to represent something to do with my job. The mall could also symbolize society's views of trends and technology. The laptop I pull out symboloizes technology, information, and modern life. It means that I understand that new opportunities are being opened up to me. The strange man's gun, symbolizes aggression, anger, and potential danger. I may be dealing with issues of passiveness/aggressiveness and authority/dependence.  So in a way I think the mall and shooting the people in the mall in a way represents society and my problems with it. So knowingly seeing that man shoot people in the mall, means that I feel as though the problems of society are a potential danger and I see a need to change it or at least ignore it. 

And the children swarming the strange man symbolizes perhaps my inner child, it perhaps symbolizes that there are positive aspects of society that I need to help maintain. The children represent a purity of what society should be. So for me to kill the man with a bat to save the kids represents that I am striving to maintain hope in society, hope in the purity, hope for something better for this greater world and in saving these kids I am saving these ideals in my own mind.

age is not a number

A couple of nurses have told me this old nurse idea. Nurses used to believe in the power of the full moon because they always remembered accidents associated with the full moon, so naturally they assumed that accidents occured more often during a full moon. But then one nurse did point out to me that the only reason why they thought more accidents happened during a full moon is because they saw and remembered seeing the full moon. People had to be shown that there was never any statistical evidence to prove that the full moon had an effect on people.

The point of the story is the reason why and how we remember things is based on two things: the intensity of the moment (i.e. emotionally, physically, intellectually) and by association. Have you ever thought about how you have your own memories? The only reason why it seems like a straight line is because we can remember how that memory is related to the previous and future versions of yourself. Think of it like a river, physically the river is a different composition from day to day, moment to moment. So depending on your perspective on time, you could technically say that the two instances of time are two unique rivers. And in a sense, the different versions of the river could be explained as past versions.

So when the question of how old you are comes up, I think people are really trying to get a sense how much experience you have in this lifetime. Is that not the reason why naive = young, old is associated with wise? And when I say experience I am saying the number of memories a person retains.

Does not everyone remember the first time they fell into love, fell out of love, first time they had sex, first time someone important to them died? And on a less personal level, where you were when 9/11 happened, when JFK died, when Princess Di died, when we landed on the moon?

All of these experiences retain one core similarity, they all made us feel something very and perhaps overwhelmingly profound. The reason for the memory is similar for all of us, but what we remember about the moment is human specific. The uniqueness of everyone's memory is defined by all those details we associate with the memory: where we were, who was there, and the emotion of the environment.

The reason why being older is associated with wisdom is because you probably have a better chance at realizing how hard life really is for everyone. But also in understanding that, you begin to understand how happiness could not exist without sadness. The reason why falling in love is so good is because you take the chance to fall out of love. And when you watch someone die, you also start to think about how important your own life really is. Expectations begin to become much more managable with experience.

My point is that when we answer with an age, it is not as indicative of a persons personality as we think it to be. We all stereotype how experience and well adapted a person is likely to be. And as hard as it may sound, we are all capable changing that stereotype within ourselves.

If you want to be simple, naive, and narrow minded, experience the same thing over and over and never get out of that cycle. To be wise, do something new and feel something while you are doing it. Find things that you are willing to fight for, die for. These are things where you will find
passion and inspiration.

And just because I am young do not tell me that I can not be wise.

"We live in deeds, not years: In thoughts not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best." -Aristotle-