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The Capacity to Love: Our Small Revolution

I don’t think anyone can honestly look at the world and conclude that we already have enough love. That we’re doing just fine.

It seems to me that we are experiencing a shortage of love.

I’m not referring to the love we feel for our partners, our children, our families, or our friends. Most of us have a handful of people we love deeply. But even that love can be conditioned by the fact that they are ours.

I’m talking about something broader.

The genuine desire for others to be well. To be happy. To suffer less. And, above all, our willingness to do something about it.

Our culture celebrates competition, individualism, and division; and yet we are all moved when we witness a true expression of love, an act of selflessness and kindness.

I remember an afternoon at the hospital while my father was undergoing surgery for a brain tumor. My mother and I were walking down the stairs toward the waiting room when we crossed paths with a woman who, seeing my mother’s distress, hugged her without saying a word. It was a long embrace. Then, just one word: “Courage.” She kissed her on the cheek and continued on her way.

That gesture affected me so deeply that it has stayed with me to this day, more than thirty years later.

Something within us recognizes these acts, perhaps because love is deeper -and more deeply ours- than we normally understand.

When I talk about loving, I don’t mean “being good.” Nor do I mean thinking of ourselves as compassionate or spiritual people, or as people with great human values. We can add all those labels to our identity and remain extraordinarily distant from others.

I mean love as a capacity. The capacity to genuinely care about others’ well-being, regardless of what we might get from them. The capacity to want others to be happy and to contribute to their happiness.

I believe we all have difficulties with love. We all have work to do.

Why is it so challenging?

One main reason is that we spend an extraordinary amount of our lives absorbed in ourselves.

My problems. My needs. My desires. My fears. My image. My success. My failures. What I need. What I lack. What others think of me. What they did to me. What they should have done. Whether they love me. Whether they respect me. Whether they value me.

The egoic mind keeps us in a near-constant state of preoccupation with ourselves.

We feel separate from others and incomplete. Something is missing. I’m not good enough. Something is wrong with me. I need to achieve something, become something, prove something, to be enough finally.

And from that state of scarcity, other people can easily become supporting characters in our own story.

I’m interested in you because you validate me. Because you love me. Because you make me feel good. Because you have something I need. Because you can help me get something I want.

And when you stop doing that, my relationship with you changes.

If we are honest enough, we can recognize some of this in many of our relationships.

It’s not that we don’t love. It’s that our love is constantly interfered with by our own needs, fears, judgments, and desires.

Meanwhile, we forget a fairly obvious reality: we are not independent beings.

We could not survive without one another. Everything we have and everything we do depends on the work, care, and cooperation of countless human beings. Life is profoundly interdependent, no matter how much our minds insist on selling us the story of our separateness.

Love can be cultivated. This is the good news.

We can develop our capacity to love. And as important as cultivating it is, learning to recognize and remove what gets in its way matters too.

This is where meditation and developing awareness become useful.

As we learn to observe our minds, we begin to recognize their tricks.

Our fear. Our resentment. Our need to be right. Our search for approval. Our indifference to suffering that does not directly affect us. Our tendency to judge. Our need to protect our identity. Our selfishness.

We begin to see everything that comes between us and others and, little by little, we can stop obeying it.

It is not an easy process. It requires practice, perseverance, and extraordinary honesty with ourselves. But as we gradually free ourselves from these egoic patterns, love has more room to express itself.

Then an interesting shift begins in our relationships with others.

The focus moves away from: What do I need from this person? What can they give me? How do they make me feel? What do I think of them? What did they do to me?

And another question emerges: How can I contribute to this person’s well-being?

That is relatively easy with the people we love.

The real work begins with those we don’t like. Those who think radically differently than we do. Those who frustrate us. Those who disappoint us. Even those who have hurt us.

Loving does not mean allowing someone to hurt us. It does not mean giving up our boundaries, remaining in a destructive relationship, or reconciling with someone we no longer want in our lives.

We can say no. We can walk away. We can protect ourselves. And still not need to hate.

We can recognize the immense clumsiness of the human condition and continue to wish that person peace, happiness, less suffering, and the ability to stop causing suffering.

Perhaps one of the most radical expressions of freedom is our capacity to love regardless of how others behave, how they make us feel, or what we think of them; our small revolution.

Faced with the enormous problems of the world, it is easy to think there is nothing we can do, and probably none of us can change the whole world.

But we all have a small part of the world over which we have enormous influence.

Our partners. Our children. Our friends. The people we work with. Our clients. Our neighbors. The people we encounter every day.

We might ask ourselves what would happen if we took seriously our ability to create a little more happiness and a little less suffering within that small circle of influence.

Not by thinking more about love, but by loving.

For those who lead organizations, that circle of influence can be enormous.

Today we see too much leadership dominated by fear and ego: scarcity, greed, the need for recognition, a hunger for attention, the accumulation of power, an obsession with winning.

But imagine how different an organization can be when it is led by someone who genuinely cares about people’s well-being.

It shows in how they listen. In how they make decisions. In how they treat someone who has made a mistake. In how they fire someone. In how they distribute profits and power. In what they are willing to sacrifice when their own interests come into conflict with the well-being of others.

Developing the capacity to love in our leaders is not sentimental. It has real consequences for thousands, sometimes millions, of people.
That may be where the revolution begins.

Not by waiting for others to love more, or by lamenting the lack of humanity in the world, but by looking honestly at our own capacity to love, discovering what gets in its way, and seriously committing ourselves to developing it.

I believe we all have work to do in this regard. It’s worth our effort.