My family meets today at my house. Three generations – and I am one of the elders – OK, the youngest of the oldest, but even so... How did that happen? When the generations before us fall away, and suddenly we find ourselves on that pinnacle, or outcrop at least, looking back at the ones toiling up behind us. Nurturing the children, watching the ones who are no longer children making their way through the thickets of adulthood.
We cannot live other people’s lives for them, but we can reach out a hand sometimes, when we have come so far, but still have so much further to go on our own journeys.
I meditated on love again this morning, as I do every day. Learning to feel that generalised love: for myself (hardest of all, of course), for my friends, for people who are difficult to like, for all living beings. To even it out and be able to say: ‘I accept you all. We are all in this life together. I will see you for who and what you are, and I will wish you well.’
I see the destructive power of both hate and love around me. I see friends who are suffering in love and I try to offer what comfort I can. We love the person who is in our heads, but sometimes we have to face up to the fact that that person does not exist, we have to let them go, and it’s hard, believe me, I know just how hard. ‘If I’d never loved, I never would have cried’. Who said that? Oh yes, Paul Simon, ‘I am a Rock’. But that is too bitter, that song, it’s a young man’s song. I hope I’m not bitter. I’ve moved beyond that, I like to believe so, anyway.

‘Love’ and ‘hate’ trip off the tongue, but is it really ‘hate’ which is the opposite of ‘love’? I think of someone else I tried to reach out to. I won’t try it again, that is too dangerous, and I have to protect myself, I’m not a saint. But I wonder, what is it that drives that person? Not love, whatever they may think, or if it is, a particularly dark and distorted form of love. Hate, then? No, I don’t believe it’s hate either, because if so, I’m not sure who the hate object is, unless either the self (and I don’t think this is true, the person in question is cunning and has very strong instincts of self preservation, I’d say), or the rest of the world in general. But I’d say that this person doesn’t hate other people so much as see them as objects, tools, to be used and manipulated at will and then discarded when they no longer fulfil the purpose intended. No, I suspect that what drives this person is neither love nor hate but fear. Fear of being alone and powerless, perhaps, of being found out, of being rejected, of seeing themselves as they are.
I don’t feel anger towards this person, but I do feel sorrow for those who have been hurt. And gratitude that I am not one of them.