Let Them and Love Them

If “live and let live” could grow up, I think it would mature into “Let them and love them”, a partnership, of sorts, between throwing the seeds and loving thy neighbor, with a little help from the plank in your own eye. Or, more clearly, allowance, patience and humility. It might feel like a glib platitude, to live and let live, but the more I heal myself, the more I realize that judgment is far more harmful to the human spirit than allowing something one disagrees with to exist. In fact, I would argue that allowing “other things” to exist is beneficial and essential to the human collective.

In the same way that free speech is essential, allowing people to be as they are lets us know who they are and lets us make an informed decision about whether or not we want that person in our lives. Without the freedom to express the truth of their being, their opinions and deeds, we can find ourselves in relationships, of all kinds, with people who are not who we think they are. People who are simply keeping enough of their opinions to themselves to survive in a rigidly ruled society. Like Soviet society, for example.

When everyone is allowed to be and live as they would like (outside of actually, physically harming others, of course) we have the gift of being able to look at who someone truly is and what they truly think and decide that we don’t want someone like that in our lives. Or that we do! I personally find that option more far appealing than the bait and switch option of marrying a masking maniac, because their true nature is bound to show itself eventually. As my husband likes to say: people are like teabags, with enough time or hot water, their true colors will show.

Moreover, it is an important lesson in the human experience to learn to not take things personally and to live one’s life as one chooses, regardless of anyone else’s opinion. Wear the clothes you like, pursue the hobbies you enjoy and, if you can find a feasible means to do so, try to make your way in the world with it, no matter how many people tell you to keep a “real job”. Have opinions, ideally well-informed ones, and live your life in alignment with those perspectives, but be open to change when faced with evidence that should change it, ideally through having different experiences. That’s what I mean by living the life one chooses. That’s what I am striving to do, at least.

But I never want to forget or fall out of touch with the notion that I also need to allow everyone else the same freedom to live in their own ways, to have their desired experiences in life. That’s the “Let Them” part, but that’s only half it. The next part is far more difficult and far more rare in today’s world: Love them. Just to be very clear, I never mean this as justification for staying in toxic, harmful or abusive situations; this is not “I love them so I’ll let them walk all over me”. Never.

The love I am referring to here is agape, from Greek, which is love for all humanity. It is the general love that Paul discusses in his letter to the Corinthians in the New Testament, telling them it is patience and kindness and forgiveness. This is the love that Jesus and Buddha and Lao Tsu and Mohammad and Confucius and Zarathustra were talking about in their different variations of the very simple truth of life: don’t do stuff to other people that you wouldn’t want other people to do to you. Love the human in front of you at least enough to recognize that they are human and deserve the same courtesies that you expect for yourself.

In fact, I like the way that it is worded in Islam the best: “[none of you truly believes until] he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself”. Or in the Tao Te Ching: “Regard your neighbors gain as your gain and your neighbors loss as your loss”. These ideas are the foundation of a peaceful society, a society built on agape love, on this one, simple rule that covers all other rules. This was the core truth of Jesus’s message, in fact, not just “do to others as you would have them to to you” or “love your neighbor as yourself”, but his principle that agape is the fulfillment of the law.

It’s interesting to me that this is a religious idea, but in reality, it doesn’t have to be. In today’s day, in the secular realm of government and politics, most of our discourse revolves around the law and control over who gets to write and erase laws, despite the fact that the purpose of law is to find ways for us to all get along and have ways to enforce these social contracts. It’s important to remember that religion and law were the same for the Judean people, even when they were also living under Roman colonial rule, and so when the bible says that love is the fulfillment of the law, it wasn’t just religious in nature.

It is my interpretation of this piece of the bible that this means that if we all loved each other with this kind and patient agape love, then there would be no need for the law period. Think about it, if this is a new concept to you; if you’re truly acting in love toward someone, truly acting kindly and taking their experience into account before speaking or acting, are you going to steal from them or murder them? No. If you can be happy for your brother’s gain, and treat it as your own, then you won’t envy him. If you love your spouse, even in this agape way, you won’t be unfaithful to them. This is what it means for love to fulfill the law.

This realization, of letting and loving at the same time, was given to me as an answer to a rather irritated question I threw into the aether as I was studying my way out of the religion of my birth. (Read my post “Losing My Religion” for more on that). As I began to realize that I had been presented with gross misinterpretations of the ancient philosophies in my youth, I audibly asked Jesus what had stopped him from lashing out at the men who clearly did not understand his universal message. To my surprise, I received an equally audible answer from the man himself and it was simple and on brand; he said: “I loved them.”

That was the answer to…everything. That was what Jesus was trying to say. He didn’t tell his followers that they needed to change the people around them, he told them to throw the seeds of love, no matter how they would be received. And he lived that. It was the answer to the question of how we deal with people who do not agree with us or live differently than us or just simply annoy us. Love them.

While I was processing a situation with my husband last week, I asked him how one deals with an archetype of human that seems to just keep coming back into our lives and this answer resonated in my heart again. Love them, that’s how we deal with them. Sometimes that love can look like silence, but sometimes it can be choosing to joke instead of criticize. Or to encourage more than we correct and listen without judging. It might seem simple, but the obvious truth of our current reality would seem to indicate that simple is not always obvious, and certainly not easy.

It is, perhaps, important to note the distinct difference between simple and easy. Yoga, for example, is simple, but not easy. One simply moves their body into different positions, using no other equipment, but holding one’s body in those positions for more than a breath or two certainly proves its difficulty. Simple, but difficult–like learning how to love people where they are, no matter who they are. That is the true path to peace and freedom, which is why every religion that has stood the test of time has a core principle that states this very idea. If every human lived out the morals and principles that they claim to have, this world would look very different than it does right now.

My final thought on this is how it relates to the allegory of “the long spoon”. Essentially, the idea is that if two people sit down at a table with two bowls of soup in front of them, but with only very long handled spoons for utensils that are taped to their hands, the only way that they will be able to eat is if they are willing to feed each other with the long-handled spoons. The metaphor is meant to encourage sharing and community and to discourage selfishness, but I would like to take it a step further: if this was the only way for us to eat, would we care about the labels or lifestyle choices or political views of the person on the other side of the table? Or would we realize that we have more important things in common, like being human, and that we should help one another simply because we understand that we both need to eat?

I believe in this idea so strongly that I asked my husband to tattoo “choose love” on my wrist, on my dominant arm, as a reminder that I want to choose to do everything in my life with love as my guide. To me, it is the only belief that makes sense in my reasoning brain as much as it resonates in my emotional heart and that feels like the right answer. Coherence. Harmony. Synergy.

We need to learn to work together and understand that our differences are necessary and beneficial to humanity as a whole, like a song that feels richer and fuller as layers of harmonious voices are added into the mix. One melody line is boring and flat and stagnant, while an arrangement with multiple harmonies, backed by an orchestra of a large variety of instruments and even more harmonies, is rich and full and emotionally evocative. Or, to put it succinctly; variety is the spice of life.

Let them live how they want to live, it doesn’t mean that we have to live that way ourselves. Allowing it to exist doesn’t condone the action or impact our personal morals, nor will we be given the karma of our neighbors simply because they lived next door. It is our duty, our calling, our conviction, and our purpose as Earth-bound human beings to answer with love, no matter what the question may be. Unconditionally.

Let them and love them. Let yourself and love yourself. Unconditionally.

Photo: Tallisker Beach, Scotland, 2019. Taken by Heidi Hahe