13 posts tagged “love”

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.
- E.B. White, writer (1899-1985)

Having an enemy requires a similar amount of time to having a spouse. The commitment must be the same as well. The amount of emotional energy consumed in maintaining the enmity may be even greater than that required for having a loving spousal relationship.

A person who maintains another as an enemy is Obsessive-Compulsive (OC). It makes no sense logically to expend so much energy on someone from whom you get little in return. It's like having a hobby you can't tear yourself away form, a hobby that is destructive rather than constructive.

Having an enemy is selfish and self-centred. While the OC enemy holder believes the focus is on the other person, the reverse is usually true. The person who maintains an enemy seeks to satisfy a dark internal need of his or her own making.

The enemy maker may be delusional. Often the perceived enemy has no knowledge of how devoted the other is to hatred of him. Nor does he care. The expenditure of energy on the enmity is almost always one way. It is not exchanged mutually, as love is.

Having an enemy is a more advanced form of holding a grudge, which is equally draining emotionally and produces nothing positive. Holding a grudge is a more polite way of saying you have an enemy.

A person who has an enemy (real or perceived) is so committed to the relationship that he or she has little time or emotional energy to devote to a positive relationship with another person. The enemy relationship takes all the emotional energy a person has.

Having an enemy is like bullying yourself. You have no one to blame for your own hurt but yourself.

Breaking off an enemy relationship is easier than breaking off a relationship based on love. To stop having an enemy, you simply refuse to acknowledge any longer that the other person is an enemy. If an enemy is real rather than perceived, most of the time what the enemy wants more than anything else is to cause fear, worry and emotional exhaustion to the other person. A real enemy relationship is another form of bullying. As with any bullying, you can't be intimidated unless you allow yourself to be intimidated. You have a choice.

Ending an enemy relationship may be easy because it requires making a decision to "end it," but the emotional commitment that is lost may be as hard as losing a loved one.

Does this sound as if love and hatred of an enemy have much in common? They do. They both require emotional commitment, devotion, even fidelity. No one can have a good relationship with an enemy if the other person could up and find someone else to be enemies with at any moment.

Is love, then, also Obsessive-Compulsive? In some ways, yes. Romantic love that grows into a more lasting friendship is healthy, whereas romantic love that does not get beyond the romance stage is doomed to failure. Romance is self satisfying, whereas friendship is more about satisfying the needs of the other person. Romance is selfish, as is having an enemy. But if it evolves into a healthy friendship, it has long term benefits for both. On the other hand, having an enemy has no benefits over the long term.

Each of us can choose to accept another as an enemy or to reject the possibility and ignore the other as much as possible. The love-hate relationships of childhood and adolescent friends testifies to how awkward it can be to establish a healthy relationship instead of an unhealthy one.

Most of us opt for the healthy kind.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to give children the skills they need to have healthy relationships with others instead of allowing the trial-and-error method teach life lessons the hard way.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.... Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love the greater the jealousy.
- Robert Heinlein, American writer (1907-1988)

The concept of jealousy may be misunderstood as often and the concept of love. Love itself is confusing because we have so many forms of it that it requires one of the longest explanations in most dictionaries.

Love, like jealousy, is an emotion. Both are basic emotions, ones that are powerful enough to take control of a person to the extent that the person's best interests or the best interests of the loved one may be compromised. If not compromised, at least the best interests of the loved one are altered by being loved as much as by being the object of jealousy.

Let's try to define love in a way that everyone can understand and that helps to avoid confusion. Love is what we give. At its best, love is altruistic, it demands nothing in return. If given love is not appreciated by the receiver, we have unrequited love. But the love is still given by one person, whether or not it is returned by the other. Those who love for real don't quit.

Jealousy, on the other hand, is not giving in nature, but taking. Jealousy is selfish. Jealousy measures what is coming in to a person from another. What is incoming may be compared with what is outflowing, but this comparison is not necessarily a part of jealousy.

Jealousy is about "me," about "what I'm getting," about "what belongs to me." Jealousy, therefore, may be about objects as much as about people. A man may be jealous of his car, not wanting others to drive it, to touch it, maybe not to do anything but admire it. The admiration is necessary because that is the part of the concept that is incoming where objects are concerned. The objects themselves can't give back whatever the possessor wants, whereas an admirer can. The jealous lover expects a return directly from the other person.

Another word for love might be generosity. The Christian Bible now often translates the word as used in the King James version as "charity" into "love." Wherever and however these words are used, their contexts have similarities.

Love is about giving. Jealousy is about taking, no matter whether what the jealous person wants to take or receive is deserved or not. Love is outgoing. Jealousy is incoming. A loving person cares more about the person she loves than about herself. A jealous person cares more about what he gets (gender switch noted, though not intended to make a specific point) than about what he gives or about whether or not what he wants is deserved, needed or even necessary.

Now let's put the two together and watch the sparks fly. When two people supposedly love each other, is a little jealousy a healthy thing? That's a little like the hostess taking an extra piece of dessert, the last one on the plate, after everyone has been served, without asking if anyone else would like it after finishing their own piece, because she was the one who made the dessert. In a social context, that's greediness. Jealousy is a form of greediness.

If a person has a jealous lover, that may give some satisfaction to the person, but only because of the attention received because of the jealousy. The jealous person demonstrates selfishness and attention to the other, not love. Someone who gives love to a sufficient degree will not be jealous because he or she will know that the object of the affection has received his or her best.

A person who gives all the love of which he or she is capable and still loses the lover to another had a relationship with the wrong person.

We have nearly seven billion people on our planet today. To believe that "There is only one person for me" is not just naivety, it's self deception. Finding the "love of your life" is a matter of taking a large survey and continuing to look until that person shows up. Along the way, the seeker must give of himself or herself to many people in order to test their response.

My wife claims that she knew that I was the man she wanted to marry after our first meeting. I believe I had a good inkling before I even met her, when I had only read a letter she had written. Was that love at first sight? Or read? No, we had both done enough searching over the years to know that we had found a very special person, one who could and would give without demanding a certain minimum in return.

One of the tests for a potential mate should be a past history of jealousy or of love. A jealous person treats the other like a chattel, one that is not too smart at that. One that is prepared to be "owned." When a jealous person has had a mate for a long period of time, he takes the other for granted so much that he may even leave the relationship or cheat on her because she is so stupid, or so he perceives. It's not so much a matter of growing apart from each other as losing respect for each other, or one (the jealous one) losing respect for the other.

People who are capable of jealousy should come with warning labels. They don't. On the other hand, it would be dishonest and harmful to test the "jealousy gene" of a new lover by giving attention to still another. That's why learning about the past history of the potential new lover is important. In general, people are today what they have been in the past.

If you want to be sure that you are never the jealous one, learn about love. Learn about what love is, how to give it, how to show it, and how to recognize it when it is shown by someone else. Often jealous people don't really know what love is because they may not have experienced it, even within their own families.

A jealous person can change, but it's not an easy task to undertake to teach a jealous lover how to be a real lover. It takes years and more patience than most people can afford.

Why is love, arguably the most important emotion we have, a subject we don't teach in schools? We have so many problems that relate somehow to love, yet we do nothing about teaching it to children. We literally have some children growing up believing that love is a business relationship on a personal level.

Business relationships eventually end. Love doesn't. Anyone who believes that love can end likely does not have a clear idea about what love really is.

Now you know what to look for. Now you know what to give. Learn how.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who know about love, how to recognize it from others and how to give it themselves. Most kids learn this from birth, but many kids get it beaten out of them as they grow, through bad experiences.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

The secret of the law of abundance is this: In order to receive and appreciate the good things of life, you must first give.
- Norman Vincent Peale, inspirational writer and speaker (1898-1993)

I confess that I have never heard of the "law of abundance" other than in this quote. The number of citations on Google is so great I conclude that many authors and speakers have used it for their own particular objectives, to lend greater credence to their arguments. The fact that Dr. Peale calls this law "secret" is nothing more than hyperbole.

However, the weakening of the first part of the quote takes nothing away from the second and more significant part. " In order to receive and appreciate the good things of life, you must first give."

This sounds counterproductive to anyone who was raised in a strongly capitalist society, where "Pay yourself first" is the prime rule for entrepreneurs and "Take as much as you can get" is the general rule for both business and personal lives.

Surely it doesn't make sense to give away what you have earned in order to get more of "the good things of life." That's true. At least it's true if you believe that the most important things in life--the "good things"--are either money or what can be bought with money.

Can money buy happiness? This debate has been ongoing for so long that it bores most people. No, many people say, but I'd like to suffer with more of that kind of unhappiness.

Does tickling a child make that kid happy? Does laughter alone give evidence of happiness? The feeling we get when someone tickles us comes from the same source as pain, from the same nerves, along the same pathways. Tickling and pain are essentially the same sensation, only pain is felt with greater intensity. If tickling and pain come from the same source, then the laughter from tickling by someone cannot be misconstrued as happiness. Happiness and pain/tickling must be different.

The joy people have from getting money, from keeping money and from spending money are all like tickling. They are all transient, all insubstantial, all subject to change in a flash. As with the sensation from tickling, the joy of money stops in a flash when the motivation stops.

A close friend expressed grief to me recently, explaining how much his "nest egg" investments in the stock markets had dropped so much in value as a result of the recession in the US. Not a single other factor in his life has changed except for the current value of his investments, but he has lost sleep over it. The fact that history shows that stock markets always recover and move to greater values means nothing to him because the value of his stocks today is much lower than it was a year ago. The tickle he felt a year ago has become his pain of today.

That's not happiness. Nor should it rightly be considered worthy of unhappiness, pain or grief. Money is no more one of the good things in life than the shirt you are wearing right now. You might miss your shirt if you lost it or it wore out, but you know that you can get another. You can always make arrangements to get more money as well, though it might take longer than buying a new shirt.

Dr. Peale said that "you must first give." That involves at least one person other than yourself. Giving to yourself is like emotional masturbation. You must give to others in order to receive and appreciate the good things of life. We even enjoy sex more when we work to make it more enjoyable for the other person. That benefit takes thought and effort, but it shouldn't cost money.

No one understands why the "law of abundance" works this way--give in order to receive more in return. It likely has something to do with our fundamental nature as social creatures. We must need each other and depend on each other to feel secure, even though logically it would seem that someone who doesn't need anyone else should be more secure. Those who feel the most secure need at least one other person, depend on at least one other person and strive to meet the needs of at least one other person.

They are happy when others around them are happy, have been made happy by something they have done themselves. That happiness returns to them, with interest.

The more we work to make others happy--not with money or what it will buy, but with love and effort--the more happy the others will be and the happier we will be in return.

The Christian Bible says "Give and ye shall receive." Now you know why. Though places of worship want money, what the Bible wants you to give is love. Give love and you will receive love in return.

No, you can't count that kind of love. But you don't have to pay tax on it either. It has no real value in monetary terms.

Have you given love in the past, but not had it return to you by the one you loved? It's highly likely that the other person was so steeped in the value of money that he or she couldn't understand the value of love. That's not your fault. Find someone else who does value the love and the happiness you have to give.

For those who believe in the value of money as the value of life, every relationship is a business relationship. Business relationships come and go based on the value that each party offers constantly and uninterruptedly to the other. That's the core of the throwaway economy.

Love should not be thrown away. True love cannot be thrown away, but business love is disposable.

Find someone who can appreciate and enjoy what you have to give of yourself. You will find it comes back to you. Over time, that joy and appreciation will increase if both parties understand and work at what Dr. Peale calls the law of abundance.

Love thy neighbour as thyself. Sound familiar? Christians will recognize it as the prime commandment of Jesus. But the same advice exists in every religion, even if the words differ slightly.

Give and you will receive. But you must give first and you must give freely, not depending on what you will receive in return. If you are looking for return, you are basing your love on the business model of love. The easy come, easy go, disposable kind.

Real love makes you feel superhuman. The best the business kind of love can make you feel is powerful. Real love helps you to understand why so many people in every culture of the world believe that there is more to existence than these body vessels we inhabit during our lifetimes. The business kind of lovers will never understand, never appreciate, never enjoy the real good things of life, either here or in some future existence.

But they may appreciate a good tickle.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can understand and appreciate the real good things of life, not just what they learn in school.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.
- François Marie Arouet (aka Voltaire), letter to Count Schomberg, August 1769

As admirable as Voltaire's reasoning ability was and as impressive his observations about human nature, I wonder how he reached the conclusion that animals know nothing of the power of life.

An avowed dog person for most of my life, I became servant to a household cat some 18 years ago. Since then my wife and I have had two other cats, one of which has epilepsy and has gone deaf.

The most impressive--dare I say shocking--lesson I have learned in my years of observing the behaviour of cats is that they are remarkably similar to humans in their needs. I don't mean just the needs for food, shelter and security, which all living things share.

Our cats do hear our grandmother clock strike because it gongs on the hour and half-hour. It means nothing to them because neither the ticking of the clock nor the gong itself serve any purpose toward satisfying their needs.

What does a clock add to our lives? At most it serves as a reminder that we must perform actions, usually in the service of others. Cats can be altruistic at times, but they are clearly not into servitude. Cats would have disappointed Pavlov.

Our cats know when they want to be fed because they are hungry. If they aren't hungry, they don't care if food is available to them or not. They don't overeat, nor do they eat in front of the television. They will, however, eat as a form of comfort, if their problem is not of a severely emotional nature.

They clearly know when they need to be touched (petted). Not only do they make their needs known to the petters, they allow little to stand in the way of their satisfying that need when they have it, if humans are around. They prefer petting from the humans they know, but will accept it from strangers who happen around at the right time.

Humans do not do that. We seldom know when we need to be touched by another, even though it's a need so fundamental to us that regular lack of touch can alter our personality.

Children almost never come to mommy demanding to be held. They may come, but they don't ask in words. The closest they come to asking is when they hurt themselves. Being held by mommy when they hurt does nothing to help the hurt, it's a way of (an excuse for) demanding to be touched without using words (we don't use words to express that need, sad to say).

Voltaire says that animals have no idea of death. I disagree. When our epileptic cat has a petit or grand mal seizure, he wants to be alone in an enclosed area, secure that he won't explode all over the place. However, for days before and after the seizure, he seeks touch and comfort many times each day. He knows when he will have a seizure, days ahead. He seeks the security he wants and needs ahead of time.

People seldom know they are about to have an epileptic seizure until it happens, or maybe just a brief period before. Cats are more sensitive to their bodies. Most of the time they do what they must to heal themselves. Only their owners insist upon taking them to vets.

For months before our oldest cat died, she came to me many times each day, to sit on my lap or to cuddle in the crook of my arm as I lied in bed napping. This was uncharacteristic behaviour for that cat, though it isn't for the epileptic one now. I don't doubt that they would know when the end of their life is near. Maybe they don't dream of heaven, but who knows?

Voltaire's reference to the clock striking, of course, refers to the death knell, not to the regular striking of a gong or ticking of the pendulum. His point is that we make much of a charade of death, most of which serves no real purpose but to make the grieving ones feel worse.

My point differs from Voltaire's in that I want us to pay attention to the characteristics and needs of animals that we share with them, but that they do better than us.

We know that dogs and cats love to be petted. We call them pets for that reason. They need touch and they demand it from those who can best provide it. To a dog or cat, brushing the fur is nothing more than another way for them to be touched.

We need to recognize our own need for touch. Life without touch is not easy and life with a decreasing amount of touch from a loved one is even harder because we feel the lack of touch and our increase in need. The death of a spouse may be hardest on those who benefitted most from loving touch from the dead mate for many years.

Hospitals (not all) and nursing homes have found the benefits of having people with pets visit so that patients can touch them. Nurses stroke their patients and touch them more than ever in the past because it helps the patients to feel better, even to heal faster in some cases.

Voltaire's quotation was not about animals after all, but about satisfying our own real needs instead of trying to play act unnecessary stuff while ignoring what is really important.

Now, while you think about it, go give someone you love a hug. Do it several times a day if you can. Don't miss a day.

One of the mysteries of love is that we can't measure it. Think not? Most of us, without being aware of it, measure how much others love us by the amount of loving touch we receive from them.

Remember, it's not just the amount of touch we receive from others that's important. It's just as important to those we love that we give loving touch to them so that they can keep track of how much we love them. It works both days. We measure love by the amount of touch we receive, they measure love by the amount they receive.

Now you can understand why the so-called Empty Nest syndrome of parents whose children have grown and left home can be so severe. And why people who consider divorce do so because their partners and they have "grown apart."

Love is an emotional word we use to describe our basic need for loving touch. Celibate nuns and priests receive little human touch, but when they devote their lives to God and to prayer the parts of their brains that trigger the feel-good response activate the same way that ours does when we are hugged by a loved one. Loving God fully can give people the same physical effect as receiving loving touch.

So, have you hugged someone yet?

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow balanced and well loved children.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

While I always have a book on my bedside table, waiting to be to read before I go to sleep, rarely do I have one that so absorbs my mind that sleep eludes me while I continue to turn pages. Richard Paul Evans' novel The Gift is one.

The Gift is admirable not just for its inspiring story, but also for the collected wisdom he puts into excerpts from the journal of Nathan Hurst, the story's protagonist, observer of life and receiver of "the gift" that makes him feel his life has value and meaning. (Before that he listened to others who treated him as a murderer.)

You can learn more about The Gift and the many other best sellers by this multi-award winning author from his web site at http://richardpaulevans.com

What I want to tweak your interest with is a few of those journal excerpts, one of which begins each chapter of the book. They stand on their own. As you read them, take a moment to consider each after allowing it to imprint on your brain. Each has a special value that deserves your consideration.

Having completed your read, consider that Richard Paul Evans has Tourette's syndrome and chronic tic disorder. Tourette's is "an inherited neurological disorder characterized by physical and vocal tics." The fact that Evans is a much sought after public speaker gives evidence that he has overcome a great deal.

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I don't believe society has ever grown more tolerant. It just changes targets.

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It's one thing to order an execution, it's a whole different matter to swing the axe.

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I feel like I've been handed a prize orchid. And I can't make a weed grow.

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Sometimes I think all I have ever known are McRelationships.

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The most important story we will ever write in life is our own--not with ink, but with our daily choices.

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I just want to get through life without ending up as a cautionary tale.

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I struggled to get out of bed this morning. I think I had an emotional hangover.

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Sometimes I wonder if it's not so much that we intend to do harm as we don't intend not to.

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Today Addison [Hurst's love interest] told me she loves me. I wasn't sure how to respond. I haven't much experienced with that sort of thing.

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To the thief, everyone's a crook. To the liar, everyone's a fraud. The curse of all sin is the mirror of false perception it traps us in.

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Heroes rarely look the way we draw them in our minds: attractive, imposing figures with rippling muscles and strong chins. More times than not they are humble beings: small and flawed. It's only their sprits that are beautiful and strong.

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I believe that the difference between Heaven and Hell is not so much the climate as the company. Living in a world populated by people like themselves would, for many, be Heaven. And for others, it would, indeed, be Hell.

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It is one thing to take joy in a child's achievements and quite another to aggrandize ourselves through them. It is emotional incest to live vicariously through a child's success.

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Small kindnesses often, unintentionally, produce the biggest payoffs.

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I feel spiritually cleansed and happy just reading these.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach life lessons to children before they need them, instead of trying to fix broken adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

God changes not what is in people, until they change what is in themselves.
- The Qu'ran

The greatest opposition that most people face about changing themselves is from themselves.

The greatest deterrent to social change resides with those who want social change but are not willing to do anything to advance the cause.

The most severe reason why our world's worst problems continue and often get worse is because people complain about them but refuse to work together to make anything different.

Why this reluctance? We want to look after ourselves and to protect or secure what we know as our greatest priority.

Nothing in the world changes unless and until humans change it. Excluding climate and weather, of course, which have the ability to change themselves as consequences of outside influences (usually from the sun).

Why do we not want things to change? Most of us face too much change around us every day. We have equipment that breaks down, commitments that get delayed because others didn't keep theirs to us, a bill we forgot to pay on time, upsets with loved ones, weather and illness that prevents us from doing what we had planned. The list of factors that affect our lives is endless and most of them we have little or no control over.

We don't want to have to change ourselves because too much is changing around us already that we can't control. So, what's he big deal? Why are we so focussed on ourselves that we're prepared to ignore problems we could solve elsewhere?

Somebody told us that we should be able to control our lives. Somebody led us to believe that we would one day reach a plateau where we would have mastered enough skills and have enough control that only minor things could go wrong. Somebody told us that one we day we could "have it made." Somebody told us we could have the perfect job and the perfect mate.

Those happened when we were kids. Those same people, trying to be encouraging and helpful, neglected to tell us that we are fallible, that we have weaknesses, that we would inevitably trust people who would lie to us and break our trust, that nobody is perfect including us, that our hearts would be broken. That sometimes life gets us down so much we think it sucks.

They also didn't give us the information we needed to understand that mistakes and failures are inevitabilities of life. Or the skills to be able to cope with life's downturns that sometimes make impending disaster seem certain.

They didn't teach us that worrying produces nothing and only does harm. Worry never solves anything, absolutely nothing. It not only wastes time, it harms our health and often our relationships with those closest to us. We worry when we think something might happen. We worry for ages, though what we worry about almost never happens.

This is the base from which we approach each new day. Change? Who the hell wants change when the world is swirling around us at a pace we can't keep up with?

Here's a suggestion. Let's teach kids the lessons that we wish we had been taught ourselves. Let's give them the tools they need to avoid the pitfalls we have faced and overcome in our lives. They won't avoid the pitfalls and failures, but they will be able to recover from them faster and with less grief.

Let's do that.

That's change though, isn't it? Yet a painless way to change.

While we're at it, teaching our kids, let's teach them about love. Not lust, not love of money (greed), not hero worship or domination, not abuse or addictive behaviour. These things masquerade as love in some places. Let's teach our kids about real love.

We may have to find out what real love is ourselves before we teach it. For those of us who grew up without love in our lives, finding real love is extremely hard. But doable.

That's painless. The lessons have to be searched out for many of us because they aren't taught commonly to all kids.

Let's teach our kids to have self respect and to respect others. If they love themselves, they won't have trouble respecting others. That's easy. And painless.

But it is change. And it won't happen by itself.

A saying I learned as a child went "God helps those who help themselves. And God help those who are caught helping themselves." It was a kind of ironic joke.

I like the version in the holy book better: God changes not what is in people, until they change what is in themselves.

What's to argue? It costs nothing. It will ease the pain of life's miseries.

Eventually it will make for a happier, more loving, more charitable and more peaceful world.

It's worth a little of your time.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book that provides the means to make social change without upset or revolution. It's a peaceful way to make changes in ways that will not defy any political ideology or religion.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

If you aren't good at loving yourself, you will have a difficult time loving anyone, since you'll resent the time and energy you give another person that you aren't even giving to yourself.
- Barbara De Angelis, relationships coach

The first part of the quotation sounds like the basic material of any relationships coach. The second part, the part that most omit from the equation, allows the whole thing to make sense. It drives home the part about loving yourself.

I relate to most of the quotes I use because they conform so well to my own experience, either personally or through observation of others. This one describes much of my life.

My childhood was totally without love. It was without hate or rancor too. It could better be described as a business arrangement between my parents. One set of grandparents--the ones I saw often--exemplified the same business arrangement. My other grandmother, a widow, loved her children and grandchildren, but lacked the means or skill to express her love, so it went largely unnoticed.

When I married the first time, I made the best business decision I knew how to make, based on my experience growing up. My wife, who left me and our two children a decade later so that she could further her career, succeeded in the teaching profession, reaching the position of school principal before she died of cancer caused by excessive and persistent overwork.

Not long after her death, my new wife and I suffered a huge financial loss, so were unable to provide my now-twentyish kids with what their mother had led them to believe they deserved from me, in the sense of financial benefits. In turn, they made the best business decision they could, they dissociated themselves from me totally. I have not seen them for 15 years, or my grandchildren ever.

Working my way through my grief at being alienated (albeit illegally and by lying to their own kids about my being dead) I learned a very important lesson, how to love myself. That lesson showed me that I have value and worth as a human being, something I had not recognized before as everyone who knew me treated me as a business contact. That's how it works, people who treat others like business associates gather friends who treat them the same way.

Knowing how to love and respect myself gave me the insight to be able to love others. Lo and behold, I no longer resented others because of the love they withheld from me. They wanted to love me because I loved them.

What's more, the more love I gave to others, the more I received back. It was the goose that laid the golden eggs. Only the gold turned out to be love, not financial wealth.

My conclusion is that the resentment I had for others I should love--perhaps including my own children, but I'm not certain--vanished when I learned to love myself. I thought I loved them but maybe they sensed resentment. I certainly didn't know how to show them love very well then.

As a side benefit to my new life, I no longer feel lonely, even when I am alone for a long period of time. As another benefit, people come to me with their offerings of love because they know what they will get in return. It's a good deal both ways.

Now I see a world of lonely people who have business arrangements as relationships, who don't know how to give or receive love fully, who have troubled children even though they tried their best to raise them well, who can't keep a marriage or "significant other" relationship for long because "the business" changes.

Money is the most important thing in their lives, though they tend to think of it in terms of possessions--"he who has the most toys when he dies, wins." They think I'm simple because I'm happy without being rich. They don't even appreciate that they are rich without being happy.

I don't know how to explain it to them.

No one should have to go through hell to get to heaven, as I did.

There are important lessons to learn and we need to teach them. Those of us who know. We may fail with some, but we will succeed with many if we keep trying to teach them. We will regret our failures, but only until we consider our successes, those we love and who love us in return because of what they have learned and received from us.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow happy, loved and successful children into happy, loved and successful adults and parents of their own children.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

In a full heart there is room for everything, and in an empty heart there is room for nothing.
- Antonio Porchia, Italian poet (1885-1968)

A full heart makes room for everything, then expands to accommodate additions, as needed. An empty heart allows nothing to breach its lack of trust, thus nothing earns it an emotional investment.

The empty heart--known elsewhere as a cold heart--wants for nothing because it doesn't allow for the possibility that it is not already complete.

The empty heart carries no baggage. Neither does it earn true friendship or love along the way because it thinks of nothing more than its own best interests.

The empty heart dies believing that it lived life the way it should, which to the full heart would be meaninglessness.

The empty heart can be changed. But the investment by another to accomplish change in the empty heart requires so much time and intensive effort, punctuated by repeated failures and fall-backs, that almost no one is prepared to make that investment.

The empty heart stands as the worst failure of humanity. Yet it rejects even the slightest effort to help it to fill.

The empty heart makes you glad that human bodies are recycled after death, for it has added nothing to the sum total of progress of humankind.

The empty heart cares nothing for the damage it does through psychological abuse, believing that everyone else should suffer as it has in the past. And as it does with each passing day.

The empty heart believes that it is superior to everyone else.

The full heart believes it will never have enough, so keep adding love and goodwill as it gives to and receives back from others.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow full hearts from small children.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

"Cancer isn't about dying, it's realizing that life is worth living."
- Adrian Welsh

How could one young man have touched so many lives so deeply, have garnered the love of everyone he knew?

Adrian Welsh died after a four year battle with cancer on March 13, 2008. He had celebrated his twenty-third birthday just a few days before.

One week after his death hundreds of people jammed into the community centre in the hamlet where he lived for a Celebration of Life. The double auditorium filled with chairs, dozens of people had to stand through the entire service. They did so willingly, without a thought for their discomfort.

They came not out of curiosity, as is often the case with funerals or memorial services, especially of one so young or someone who died in a tragic event. They came out of love, first of all, and secondly out of respect.

Adrian Welsh was special.

Many of the comments given in person and in the souvenir program for the event noted that he died before he had a chance to live his life. They were wrong. Adrian lived more life in 23 years than most people do in 80.

He wasn't wild and crazy. He was daring, refusing to give in to fears and doubts.

Adrian believed that life is about having fun with whatever you do. Everyone wants that, but few manage it. His desire for fun was different.

He believed that for him to have fun doing whatever he was doing, the people he was with had to enjoy themselves too. That was his prime objective in life. He put the welfare and enjoyment of those he was with ahead of his own.

For a guy who was basically shy, Adrian made a huge number of friends, a few of them very close and special friends. He accomplished this by helping everyone to enjoy their life, whatever they were doing.

Nine years ago, at age 14, he began his first job as a part time dishwasher in the restaurant of a resort. He gained an interest in cooking by watching the chefs who prepared meals in fine dining styles. Two years ago, at age 21, Adrian became the head chef for that restaurant.

The daily newspaper in the city nearest where Adrian lived posted two pictures with the half page feature celebrating the life of this young man, a rare tribute to anyone. One of those photos showed him and a friend paddling a canoe, the feeding tube through the front wall of his abdomen visible on his bare chest.

Adrian never allowed circumstances to prevent him from enjoying himself and from having fun with whoever he was with.

Everyone who knew Adrian Welsh has their own special memories of him. There is one memory that each one of them shares.

Adrian had an infectious smile. He smiled at everyone, whether he knew them or not. Everyone within the range of his smiles felt immediately comfortable, at home, no matter where they were.

More than anything else, Adrian's smile and his caring attention to those around him will be a legacy that will last for a very long time.

He passed that legacy to me, as one who barely knew him.

Now that you know how, you can build your own legacy in the same way. It won't cost you a thing. Thanks to Adrian.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want their children to grow to be happy, confident and lovable adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

All You Need Is Love, according to the Beatles song. What does that mean?

We can't eat love. The sexual version provides a limited amount of exercise, though better if done in bright sunlight so we can absorb UV rays that our bodies can convert to vitamin D. We can't wear it, though love may put a relaxed look on the face of a receiver. We can't buy anything with love.

What can we do with love? Martina McBride sings a song called Love's The Only House Big Enough to Hold All The Pain In The World. It's a good song, but I can't wrap my head around what it could possibly mean.

Can love be everything that is important in life? John Lennon thought so, though he tended to enjoy his drugs (when he wrote the song) so much that we might want to question the value of his judgment.

When we are in pain we do tend to turn to those who love us. But that kind of loving doesn't stick. It's like the bathtub drain loving the feel of water running through it.

Can we ever get enough love that all the pain we might have to endure in life would be dulled or not affect us? Maybe, but I'm thinking of that bathtub again.

Let's see what some famous people have said about love.

"Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it." Martin Luther King Jr.

"Wherever there are jars [shocks in your life], wherever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love." Mohandas K. (The Mahatma) Gandhi

"It's not how much we do but how much love we put in the thing. It's not how much we give but how much love we put in the giving." Mother Teresa

Mr. King, the Mahatma and the Mother were well known for their inspiring speeches. These quotes inspire, but they may be difficult to translate into action.

Let's look at what the recently dubbed richest man in the world has to say. Given that rich people tend to focus more on gaining money than on improving their people skills, we may approach this one with skepticism.

"There's nobody I know who commands the love of others who doesn't feel like a success. And I can't imagine people who aren't loved feel very successful." Warren Buffett

Though Mr. Buffett uses language as we might expect a rich man to use and he has twisted the meaning so it came out backward, I believe he has a more important point to make than the others.

How can we command the love of others? He should have said "have ready access to the love of others." That's what he meant. Love cannot be commanded, in the usual sense of the word.

There is only one way to have access to the love of others without having that unstable bathtub scenario. To get love, we have to give it. That's the kind of love that lasts, that doesn't drain away leaving us empty after the "event."

Despite what some have said, love is not the only thing you have to give away to get more. That's true of most emotions. If we give anger, we will get back anger or fear, for example.

As accepted as this concept of giving in order to get more is among those who know the real value of love, it's not taught to every child.

We assume that every mother loves her children, no matter what. Or we believe that, despite some evidence to the contrary, such as a mother who suffers from severe post partum depression who may seem to want to kill her baby. We assume that every child loves its parents, though evidence is mounting that this is not the case in every family.

These assumptions about love are wrong. Love may be a natural emotion for us, but it has to be taught. If a child does not learn about love in its fullest sense before it's prime learning years are past (by age six, to a lesser extent age 11), then that person will always have a problem giving love as an adult even if he or she learns how to give it and to receive it.

Like an addict who spends the rest of his life "recovering" from his addiction, an adult who learn about love in adolescence or later will have to be regularly reminded about what love is, how to give it and how to receive it.

Our need for love is the part of love that's natural. Knowing how to give it and to receive it in a socially acceptable form is not part of our natural makeup. It must be taught if we want and expect people to know it.

In order for love to be taught to children, their parents must understand how love works before their children are born. Otherwise they may learn to late to teach their kids, then the kids may have problems the parents don't understand and will have no idea how to cope with them.

Given that the rate of divorce in developed countries hovers around the 50 percent mark, meaning that roughly half the couples who have children will separate and half or more of the single mothers and their children will live in poverty, we need to get teaching about love soon. The divorce rate proves that not many newly married couples know about love, even if they do know about romance.

It's all very well to have goals for children of being professionals or corporate CEOs, but if they don't know, understand and appreciate love, they will not have a full life. They could be rich, but not successful at life.

Even the world's richest man knows that. I'll bet Warren Buffett had a very loving mother.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers to learn what kids need in terms of their social and emotional development, including how to love and to receive love.
Learn more at http://billallin.com