Tolstoy on Love:
“Love is a present activity only. The man who does not manifest love in the present has not love.”
Epictetus on Love and Loss:
"At the times when you are delighted with a thing, place before yourself the contrary appearances. What harm is it while you are kissing your child to say with a lisping voice, “To-morrow you will die”; and to a friend also, “To-morrow you will go away or I shall, and never shall we see one another again”?
[brainpickings.org]epictetus-love-loss/
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.The Buddhists are right -- don't be attached to particular outcomes. Enjoy the present moment and understand that everything is impermanent. Epictetus in particular has it pegged, I think ... prepare mentally for the worst at all times.
Is it "better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all"? The jury is very much still out on that for me. I experience my lost loves as tears in the fabric of my spacetime so to speak -- permanent, ghastly abominations that you can learn to coexist with and mostly ignore, but they're always there and I don't know that I've been entirely successful in integrating them. I've lost enough that it causes me to not trust the future or that present efforts are worthwhile. My wife has had a similar life experience and we get along on the basis of having that mutual understanding, so there's that.
It's hard to have genuine emotional attachments to begin with but in my case, the three people I'm closest to -- my wife, stepson and oldest grandson -- all have worrying health issues and sometimes I feel like I'm abusing myself to love them in view of what things have probably at least an even chance of happening down the road. But ... they count on me for that so I provide it. I try to focus on what I have in the present and that I had it at all. The old "don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened" parlor trick. Works on good days. Cold comfort on bad days.
Similar problem at a lesser amplitude: our two beloved dogs are halfway through their lifespans and we have to start preparing for their demise as well. We agree that they will be our last dogs, for both emotional and practical reasons (we may not outlive the next 15 years cycle of doggies, which would be unfair to them).
Meanwhile my two surviving brothers are both in their 70s and one is in bad health ... sometime in this decade most likely I'll bury them both, and as the youngest sibling, will be the one to turn the lights out on our family so to speak.
This is a lot of heavy shit so I am increasingly disassociated from my emotions. I don't know where else to go with them, but into the bit bucket so to speak.
mordant
Level 8
Sep 4, 2018
1
@RoadGoddess The role of suffering is an interesting topic. We are so inured to suffering that often we tend to think it is necessary or desirable to rationalize for some reason. I regard this as a failure of imagination.
While to an extent we need contrast in order to put certain things in perspective, there's plenty of contrast in life between good things, without having the extreme contrast of, e.g., tragedy vs triumph. I can tell the difference between lesser and greater goods, without having to toss disasters into the mix. I'm of the view that while one can make lemonade from lemons, or as the Brits say "make the best of a bad job", suffering is not ennobling or necessary, and in fact, all things being equal, always diminishes the sufferer. It takes time and energy to deal with that could be put to far better use.
While human suffering remains a fact of life, like it or not, my concern is that we do not excuse or tolerate it or normalize it, but always work to minimize it. Compassion and empathy demand no less of us.
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