Love Is A Radical New Thing

Staring at our phones is just the beginning. Wagging our fingers, scowling at the world and isolating ourselves are symptoms. Seeing our lack of humility, facing the challenge of vulnerability, and harnessing the power of love are solutions. This article is about the crisis of self-disconnection in the world today, and how to overcome that crisis by acknowledging, enriching and empowering the connections we already have in our lives.

Understanding Ourselves

Despite the well-meaning teachers, community leaders and writers trying to teach us, people believe they’re doing all this alone more than ever before. Almost all of us are afflicted by this, too. Whether we’re burned out suburban parents or aspiring entrepreneurs, social media pushes us to post vain selfies, push arrogant self-promotion and cultivate images of narcissistic glory. This is afflicting old people, young people and everyone in between.

I don’t think anyone wakes up in the morning wishing they were more self-centered. Sure, we learn to take care of ourselves and remove unnecessary drama from our lives, but that doesn’t make us oblivious to the needs of those around us and beyond.

Somewhere along the way though, people can become manipulative, unconsciously forcing their friends, family and coworkers to do their bidding, become their minions, and fulfill their demands with no intention of supporting others, building community or lifting those without power or ability.

Forcibly demanding others bend to our will, conniving to change others’ thinking without their investment, and alienating those who care for us can separate us from the people who care the most about us.

Relying on the Power of Love

A year before he was assassinated, Dr. King gave a speech called “A Time To Break The Silence,” in which he said,

“…I have also decided to stick with love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer to humankind’s problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. And I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love; I’m talking about a strong, demanding love.”

Dr. King was killed because he saw the power of love for what it is: An infinitely accessible, directly effective and wholly powerful instrument to fight arrogance, conceit and ignorance. At the same time he was determining this, there was a contradictory force rising in the garage of a young inventor in suburban Washington state. A machine meant to harness the capability of individuals and built on the premise that each man is an island unto his own, the personal computer became one of the most isolating forces humankind ever faced.

Through the decades afterwards, technology became more and more alienating and separating, but not without the veneer of interconnectedness. Relying on the internet as a worldwide superhighway for knowledge, ideas and opinions, computers have become smaller and faster, further allowing and encouraging individuals to believe they’re acting in a vacuum without obligations to others. To be clear, personal computers and the Internet did not create narcissism; however, they’ve exacerbated it beyond the wildest imagination.

“Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure….This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing. We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love’s promise.”—bell hooks in All About Love: New Visions

We can rectify this challenge. It will not be an easy or simple fix, but it’s tangible and present. The answer has been present for millennia, and even though its under-credited, history shows it repeatedly. In his 1855 book called Where Love Is, God Is, Leo Tolstoy showed us the basis for this understanding when he wrote, “Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love.”

Through the wisdom of Dr. King, as well as many others like bell hooks, Angela Davis, Mahatma Gandhi, and Caesar Chavez, we can begin to craft approaches to love as a tool, a possibility and a gift for transforming the world we live in. Love is the single greatest resource we have, and moving from seeing it as a poetic plaything towards enacting it as a passionate, powerful instrument will help us actualize the reality that another world is possible.

We each have to rely on the power of love to overcome the arrogance, conceit and narcissism trying to overwhelm our hearts and our communities. This requires that we move love into action.

Moving Love Into Action

In 2017, Senator Corey Booker shared powerful words on Twitter when he wrote,

“Love is not a being word, it is an action word… When you see hate out there, understand that the challenge will never be the hate of some, but the silence, indifference and apathy of the many.”

Throughout my career, I have sought and struggled to harness my own commitment to putting love into action. Living in a patriarchal society that emphasizes machismo over vulnerability and highlights individuality over interdependence, my work has been chagrined for being too compromising, too sensitive and too aware.

I have learned from the words I’ve shared here as well as others, and I’ve learned the following lessons for putting love into action.

Feel Your Heart. Feeling feelings can be scary. It can feel weak. It can be thankless. And you need to do it anyway. Feel things relentlessly, no matter what they are.
Let Go Of Entitlement. Meant to keep us from the pain of trauma, entitlement is generally unrealistic and unhealthy, and prevents us from relying on ourselves to heal.
Be Aware Of Your Suffering. When you experience hard times or big challenges, you can suffer. Anxiety, depression and hurt come from this. Be aware of this and what it leads to.
Serve Others Relentlessly. Caesar Chavez said it best: “Being of service is not enough. You must become a servant of the people. When you do, you can demand their commitment in return.”
Love Without Inhibition. There’s a certain recklessness that’s implied when you move beyond the “bosh” love Dr. King explained above. Be about it, love without inhibition and move into a new space that is unstoppable. When enough people love enough ways the whole world will change.

These lessons are not a road to happiness; they are a call to love. Even though those two words are not synonymous, they aren’t far apart. Moving love into action is a brave, ridiculous, essential thing that we all must do if we’re going to change the condition of the world we’re in today.

In her 2012 book Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, Cheryl Strayed wrote, “You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.” Love is not really a radical new thing, but if that’s how we must see it to become warriors for love, then let’s see it that way.

We need to become nothing less.

How to Engage Anyone, Anywhere

I don’t sell secrets.

Working with the people in the places where I do, I am often forced to adopt a label. These last few years, I’ve taken to alternatively calling myself a speaker, facilitator, speaker, author and other things. While none of those are inaccurate, none really captures what I do.

What I really do is help people learn to engage more people, more effectively. Using a lot of different methods for doing this, I have spent my entire life doing this. While few of the titles I’ve ever had captured this, my livelihood remains the same.

Want to know how to engage anyone, anywhere? Here are three ways.

How To Engage Anyone, Anywhere

Learn What Engagement Is, and What It Isn’t. Many people want engagement to mean everything to them and their business, organization or life. They want to be engaged all the time in every way they can. In reality, engagement will not allow you to do that. The definition of engagement is “any sustained connection to anything within or around ourselves.” The key phrase there is sustained connection. From an ecological perspective, sustained doesn’t just mean long-lasting, but also includes healthy, welcomed, effective and meaningful. Learn the difference between what you’re trying to engage others in, and what engagement is not. Do you really want people to engage in your topic, activity, place, culture or otherwise?
Speak to the Heart, Touch the Mind. Don’t try to engage with the ways people think about things. Instead, engage with individual peoples’ Heartspace. Heartspace is the engine of personal engagement, and is entered through feelings, emotions and experiences as well as thoughts and ideas. Work with people, not at people; create opportunities for people to do for themselves without creating opportunities for you to do more for them. That’s speaking to the heart and entering personal engagement through Heartspace.
Stop Trying to Engage Other People. Basically, the challenge is for you to accept responsibility. If you’re concentrating on engaging other people, you aren’t focusing on engaging yourself. If you’re engaged in yourself, other people will want to become engaged in whatever you’re engaged in. Like attracts like. The converse is true too: If you’re disengaged, others will not engage in what you’re trying to engage in. That means that if people aren’t becoming engaged in what you’re trying to engage them in, its truly because you’re not engaged in it yourself. The principle behind this concept comes from the Mahatma’s charge that we, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Those three ways to engage anyone will work in schools, community programs, government agencies, businesses, at home and throughout society. What do you think? Share your thoughts, ideas and responses in the comment section below!

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It’s a DIY Life.

I believe that we can each change the world. I believe we can all change our lives, too. After all, it’s a DIY life. Here’s why.

We have to look at the details.

The real challenge of changing the world and changing our lives is to learn to see nuance and acknowledge subtleties in ourselves, in others and all the way around us. In a society that is constantly dumbing us down, we are all becoming increasingly polarized society within ourselves and with other people.

Its a DIY life because we have to look at the details. The systems that want to control us would like us only to look at big pictures and ignore the little things. They anesthetize us with sitcoms and reality tv, paint gigantic swaths of misinformation on the nightly news and internet, and bombard us with too many Facebook friends to actually care for any of them. Looking at the details leads us to caring for the little flower petal pictures made by young kids, hold hands with old relatives, and be kind to strangers on the streets. Little things matter, and living a DIY life teaches us that.

We have to see beyond black and white.

More and more, everyone seems to believe in A/B, either/or, black/white, us/them thinking through reductionism and isolationism. Anyone wants to make a decision for themselves or prove a point to others will just follow the formula taught to us by today’s media:

Be dichotomous and show only two sides to the issue.
Demonize people you disagree with and make sure they know how much you disagree with them.
Point fingers and alienate others whenever possible.

We have to learn to see the colors beyond the outlines drawn for us by other people. It’s a DIY life because of the greys, blues, yellows and awesomeness all around us. We miss those in between areas when we rely on the world to paint our pictures for us. We can miss the in betweens, the both/ands, and the we/us thinking that is inherent in an interdependent world.

We have to hold out hope.

Great ideas routinely die in the hearts of brave and strong people because of this formula, at home, in businesses, across communities, throughout organizations and all around our society. Politics are rotten inside the Beltway, in state houses, and in city halls because of that thinking. Talk shows and the news are generally terrible because of it.

In each and every moment lies hope for the universe and eternity. This DIY life can teach each of us to let go when its time, and hold on when we’re supposed to. It embraces sustainability and eschews disposability by seeing more broadly than just this moment, this place, in this specific way. We have to hold out hope no matter what is going on in the world around us, and that hope won’t come from outside of us; it comes from within. The real hope is for you, and that’s why it’s a DIY life.

We have to accept responsibility.

For almost 20 years, I have taught people to see that we are all part of the problems AND the solutions in our world. We are all responsible for the status of the world today. Whether or not we’re conscious of it and accept it, we are ALL responsible for the world today and we ALL act on that regardless of our best intentions.

It’s DIY life because nobody else can effectively drawn a plan for your life that you have to follow. Your mind belongs only to YOU, and you are the ultimate person responsible for what goes into it and comes out of it. Accepting responsibility means owning up to your station in life, embracing it and moving forward boldly towards who I am and what I’m doing. My station in life isn’t complete, isn’t finished and doesn’t mean that I cannot change. Instead, its the opposite – it means that I’m unfinished, my life is a process, and this is a journey we’re on, not a destination.

We have to begin with ourselves.

Only after recognizing the subversive ways our own hearts and minds have been manipulated can anyone begin the work of dismantling the powerfully oppressive hegemony of injustice throughout our society. Only after recognizing our own fallibility can we challenge our culpability, and only after challenging our culpability can we call others to the carpet. Trying to do it before that makes us hypocritical at best. At worse, it makes us the worst offenders.

Learning to look within, be within and change within ourselves can be a scary, frustrating and obtuse process. That’s why it’s DIY! No human on Earth comes to their born day with a guide prepared to be implemented. Society constantly urges us to rely on large, impersonal engines designed to command and control our movements, actions and thoughts. Beginning with ourselves is the opposite of that; the rewards are boundless.

Then we have to change the world.

When we’ve confronted ourselves, then we can confront others. Then we can take action for social change. Then we can try to change the world. But it all goes back to what old Gandhi said: Be the change you wish to see in the world. It’s a DIY life because the world isn’t waiting for you to change it, and you cannot wait on the world to change. Instead, as you accept responsibility for yourself and lean into DIY, you’ll discover there’s an inevitability to engaging with the world around you and working to transform it, either accidentally or on purpose.

I have learned that we have to change the world because the world we see around us reflects the world within us. When we’re not satisfied with who we are, how we are we cannot be satisfied with the world and how it is. The converse is true, too: When we change ourselves, the world around us has to change because of that change within us. If it doesn’t change, we have to change it. That’s the nature of being human!

Live your DIY life as fully, wholly and meaningfully as you wish. Embrace it! And take action steadily knowing that you can be the change you want to see in the world!

Loving Others

In his classic Stranger In A Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein wrote, “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” Loving others while living conscious of Heartspace gives us the opportunity to love ourselves more. What is it that makes love so powerful?

Love in your life is like a DNA strand, looping across the inside of a globe, dozens of ribbons twisting from one side to another. Each point where they entwine represents a sustained connection in our life. Each of these sustained connections is love. The globe is actually a sphere made of triangles, ala Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic spheres.

As we trace along one of these DNA strands as it twists, we discover many different connections. You can name this strand anything you’re deeply connected to within yourself, be it bicycle riding or poetry or house cleaning. You do these things for yourself, and nobody else compels you.

Now find another strand to follow. Notice it’s unique intricacies, the details and knobs that make it it’s own topic. This time you’ll see the this strand represents the connections you maintain to the world around you. You’ll see family and friends, places and experiences go whizzing by.

Then I am reminded of the words of a 20th century German poet named Rilke, who wrote,

“We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it. To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

Suddenly, Rilke’s words show how all our connections to others gain context as well as purpose, especially when they are done through love. We can begin to see how love strengthens our Heartspace—The Engine of Engagement. I have wrestled with love, as familial and friendly love has often felt compromised and challenging. I have struggled through agape, that universal love Dr. King spoke so eloquently said is, “understanding, creative, redemptive good will for all men,” and still seek to understand it in my life and throughout the world. None of this says anything for romantic love, which while some experience as bosh, others find deeply rewarding, a roadway to understanding the Universe completely.

All this is to say that Heartspace is strengthened through love of all kinds. Your friends, your world, and your lovers do nothing but connect you more sustainably within yourself and the world around you. Any kind of love does this, too. This is not to make parasitic or anemic love acceptable, but to show that even their apparently ugly, senseless mutations are purposeful in this world. This meaningfulness occurs whether you are conscious of it or not, because there is nothing outside Heartspace. Everything that exists relies on sustainable connections, and those are only forged in the steely furnaces of engagement, and that is Heartspace.

Relax into loving others, and know that you will only gain no matter what the circumstance. This is Heartspace.

Written by Adam Fletcher, this article was originally posted to http://commonaction.blogspot.com. Learn more at adamfletcher.net!

Category Archives: love

Love Is A Radical New Thing

Understanding Ourselves

Relying on the Power of Love

Moving Love Into Action

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Loving Others