Will Smith’s ideas on Love, “So I was thinking about love… I was thinking about how difficult it is for us to find and to maintain the love that we all yearn for and it kind of dawned on me that I think a big part of the problem is that we mis-define love.
It’s possible that no other one subject has been more analysed, talked about, and experienced by every single person on this planet than love and yet we really have no clue what it is… you cannot make a person happy; you can make a person smile; you can make a person feel good; you can make a person laugh; but whether or not a person is happy is deeply and totally and utterly out of your control; the thing that we call love the thing that we’re searching for and we’re trying to create that we call love is actually not love.
- Krishnamurti talked about the concept of the desire pleasure paradigm that we think about love in terms of desire and pleasure meaning that if you meet my needs then I love you; if you
don’t then I don’t; so that love becomes transactional; if you do what I want if you meet my desire and give me pleasure, I love you; if you don’t meet my desire and you don’t give me pleasure I don’t love you; I think that that is the insatiable nature of desire trying to get somebody to fill our cup. I think that that leads to anger, and it leads to frustration, and ultimately it makes us break apart from people.
My daughter Willow really taught me a hard lesson I think that the real paradigm for love is a gardener and flowers; so the relationship that a gardener has with a flower is the gardener wants the flower to be what the flower is designed to be, not what the gardener wants the flower to be you want the flower to bloom and to blossom and to become what it wants to be, you want it to become what God designed it to be, you’re not demanding that it become what you need it to be… love is spelled LUV- Listen, Understand and Validate.
What you hear as true listening is a magnificent superpower; a really deep listening and we can’t listen if we got something that we want to say; listening is a connective energy learning how to quiet your own mind and quiet your own thoughts and quiet your own needs and desires and listen to what the other person is saying. There is nothing that feels better to a human being than to feel understood; the mission is to thoroughly and completely understand what the person is saying; and what has been helpful for me is to repeat back what the person has said to you and then the V is validate the things that you recognize as true in what they say validate them as true; …. love is help everybody is having a hard time so love is really devotion to their struggle; it’s when you’re committed to helping somebody with their life; helping them to suffer less; you know, helping them to manage their minds and their emotions; I think love is a deep desire for our loved ones growth and they’re blossoming and they’re all around well-being.
When you love somebody, you want them to feel good; you want them to be happy and you want to see them succeed in life; and love really demands an in-depth understanding of their hopes and their dreams, and their fears, their needs, and trauma. I think love is giving and sharing our gifts for the purpose of nurturing, empowering them, and helping them create their greatest joys.”
Khalil Gibran sums this up beautifully: “Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf….. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow”.
