Scale Up Your Love…
“Scale up your love! Why only love one person when you can fall in love with the whole universe.” —Sadhguru
A story in the Los Angeles Times caught my attention yesterday: “Americans face an epidemic of loneliness. For some, supermarket self-checkouts make it worse.” Staff writer Marisa Gerber shared poignant stories about how meaningful a few minutes of conversation every week with the same cashier can make a world of difference in the lives of some.
Sometimes we’re in a hurry and desperately need the quick convenience of self-checkout or other ways to streamline completing errands.
Where everybody knows your name
And they’re always glad you came
You wanna be where you can see (ah-ah)
Our troubles are all the same (ah-ah)
You wanna be where everybody knows your name.
Many of us can probably sing along to the Cheers TV show theme and recognize the wisdom found in the lyrics. While I’ve never been interested in going to a bar, I’ve had fun this year joining my friends Donna, Dick, and Joe for their weekly lunch at a local Mexican food restaurant as often as I can.It’s always a joy to witness the connections they’ve developed with the owners and wait staff because they show up again and again. We ignore the blessing of these kind of connections at our peril. They are the mundane but oh-so-vital connections that can help us through lonely and sad times.
Do you have places you regularly go where you’d be missed if you didn’t show up? Or are you that person for someone else? We never know how much our brief conversations might matter to someone. And one day those connections might be a lifeline for us as well.
May you scale up your love to include an ever-widening circle of people. And may this love come back to you 100-fold.
Our True Destiny
“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone―we find it with another.”
―Thomas Merton
Awaken That Light
“When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him.”
―Albert Camus
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
