the growth of love over time, when and where anger comes from, finding ways to bolster self-love and universal compassion

Martin Luther King Jr. once said:
"Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method that rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation.
The foundation of such a method is love."

It would be nice to think that babies know no evil- that they are free of guile, treachery or bad thoughts. It seems pretty clear from studying thier expressions that they know about wonder, about discomfort (a wet diaper, absent parent, hunger), and about happiness. A good question is whether or not thier discomfort leads to sadness or rage- does the latter only develop as children age? Perhaps the best one to answer this question to Paul Ekman, the 'expression guru' who studied emotion by mapping expressions and ultimately created facial-recognition for 7 'universal emotions'. This question interests me because anger (or relatives/descendants such as rage and jealousy) seem to be the direct opposite of love. Not only is anger often incited by those we love the most, it is also the most able to overcome our desire for peace- to enable us to kill or injure others.

Perhaps the real answer to the question is that the ability to hate grows with the ability to love. When we are born we are primarily self-loving. Babies want all of thier own needs met right now, regardless of the lack of sleep this may cause thier parents (or the neighbors who live on the second floor). As they grow up they learn to love and appreciate thier family, and to have non-relatives (friends) that they also love. I think adolescence and young-adulthood together form the time in western culture during which people grow a new ability to love- a greater compassion for mankind in general, and even a new perspective on thier love for thier parents (my mom is a person?, thier friends and their community.

Erik Erikson created a theory of psychosocial development in which different phases of life have different crises/struggles which we seek to resolve. They seem oddly consistant with my new 'theory of love-development' in which we go through different periods of focusing our attention and perceptions on different layers of care for ourselves and others. Erikson's first struggle (lasting from birth to one year of age) is trust v. mistrust. If a child fails to trust her caregiver, if her basic 'self-love' is not met, then her orientation towards the world is one of 'mis-trust', a bad place from which to try and develop a love for others. I wonder if mistrustful infants have trouble forming strong, reliable attachments with others as they get older- i feel as if it would prove a factor, although a surmountable one.

According to Erikson I am in the lingering shadows of the "Identity v. Role Confusion" stage and on the doorsill of "Intimacy v. Isolation". This make sense given extended dependence on my parents throughout college, resulting in a longer period of identity development and an extended need for parently guidance and resources. However- the relationship I am currently in is certainly of a different caliber than my first high school relationship, or even my early college relationships. This new love has been on my mind and while I continue to question what I want to do with my life and how I want to approach it (identity searching) these questions are suddenly joined with: How do I want to live? How does one preserve love, passion and companionship with a lifepartner? Does puppy love really have to end? How exactly do you raise children? How to you accept thier independence from you?

I believe my new ability to love a partner is also joined by a new love of my family. For the first time I have experienced the death of a close relative, my grandmother, and am finally recognizing the consequences of my mother's move to Tennessee from Alaska. Along with a recognition of loss comes a new desire to appreciate my family and to cultivate thier presence in my life. Friends and mentors too have taken on a new light as I examine the influence others have had on my life and learn to commit to these relationships in a new way. All of these are part of the struggle erikson is talking about- a search for and deepening of intimacy. The older I get the more I seem to seek and find this intimacy with strangers, with people I haven't even met. When I searched "compassion" on google the definition was "a deep awareness of and sympathy for another's suffering". This is interesting because I think of compassion more like empathy, as a new recognition of someone's humanity. Of how familiar they are to you in both thier happiness and suffering.

In the last day I had two notable moments of intimacy and empathy with strangers. The first started innocently enough: I went to get a mid-day cup of coffee at the Gelato Fiasco during an 8-hour photography workshop. While approaching the register I made eye contact with a woman standing there and smiled. In "Born to Be Good" Dachner Keltner describes the smile we often give to strangers as 'tight' at the corners- a not-entirely-trusting smile. The smile I gave to this stranger was real, for some reason she called it out of me, and the smile she gave me in return was also real- crinkling her eyes at the corners. When I reached the register I realized I had no cash to pay for my $2 coffee and fumbled with my change, hoping to avoid paying such a small amount with a credit card. When I apologized to the person behind the counter the woman standing next to me asked "How much is it?" When I told her the amount she took $10 out of her wallet, handed it to the woman behind the counter and refused my protests. When I thanked her and told her she had made my day she told me it had made hers too and walked out the door. I flushed with pleasure, shaking my head. She blew me away. $2 is a small tip, the price of a fast food item, a relative pittance to most Americas and yet she had bought an incredible change in my mood and awareness for the day.

The second incident occured earlier this afternoon in the lunchroom at Brunswick Jr. High school. So much of what occurred at that table was an exagerrated drama- kids bragging, shaming each other, pushing themselves into other's attention. The boy next to me, a small boy with freckles and glasses who is simultaneously friends with (and crushing on) the girls and friends with (and somewhat belittled by) the boys. As he threw his bids for attention down I was at first bemused and sometimes a little irritated by him. In a moment of silence I looked over at him, at his childish profile in his oversized coat, and saw a child- thought of him as my child. I looked around the table and suddenly I imagined all of those students as a child that I had born and raised. Suddenly instead of irritation and bemusement I felt sympathy- that who they really might be at home needed to be covered up in this social battlefield, that thier bids for attention came from a need to know themselves socially. I wanted to really get to know each one of them, to appreciate them free of their self-consciousness. Later, as I was leaving the classroom the freckled boy was playing around with a taller dramatic girl he seemed to really like. As he swung his arm past I saw a vertical scar on his wrist beneath the hem of his sleeve, a somewhat recent but definitely healed line trailing away from his hand. I'm not sure if it was a skateboard accident or something darker but I do know that seeing that mark opened my mind to the possibility of a darker suffering. When I look at this boy from now on I will seek to see much more than the flat portrait that the lunchroom revealed. Everyone is always so much more complicated then I could know and sympathy is always a preference to anger or confusion. I like loving kindness meditation because it helps me practice abd remember to have such sympathy. I hope I can send some good wishes to that boy tonight- of health and happiness. Here is a traditional loving-kindness phrase to be used first with oneself and then expanded to others:

May I be free from inner and outer harm and danger
May I be safe and protected
May I be free of mental suffering or distress
May I be happy
May I be free of physical pain and suffereing
May I be healthy and strong
May I be able to live in this world happily, peacefully, joyfully, with ease.
-The Activist's Ally, pg. 29