Morning Thoughts: The Greatest Love

Recently at a choir concert my kids performed Whitney Houston's "Greatest Love of All," a natural choice for a feel-good finish to a school concert. Children are the future. Don't rely on hero-worship, but find inner strength. Learn to love yourself. All good stuff. But it got me thinking about things, of course. Specifically this line:

    I decided long ago

    Never to walk in anyone's shadow

The thing is, self-love doesn't come easy to many people, so a lot of us can be somewhat militant about it. I think that's where we get it wrong. The point is, this line is bad. It embodies the way we, culturally, tend to view every human interaction as fundamentally competitive. When you love yourself, you don't have to worry about whether anyone else is overshadowing you. It frees you up to love others without feeling threatened by them. That is literally what healthy self-love is. And you don't get there by shoving your greatness down everyone's throat, You don't have to follow every other sentence with "because I'm the most awesome person in the world," and then expect everyone else in the room to applaud your positive self-image. That's a kind of insecurity, by the way. More a cry for help than a sign of being well-adjusted. The need for constant praise, either from yourself or others, isn't a hallmark of a healthy heart and mind. 

When you love yourself well, you don't have to try to outdo anyone, and you don't get concerned with whether or not they're outdoing you. And the whole "we're ALL winners" mentality is what poisoned the minds of so many of my generation, because it still clung to that sense of competitiveness, which left all of us desperately searching for the way in which we personally were the winner, while having to confront the reality that people of greater talent and more developed skill were all around us. We focused on isolating a specific talent or attribute that proved our worth, instead of cultivating a sense of our innate value just by virtue of our existence. 

I guess here's the point. Love, including self-love, isn't competitive, and we need to stop feeling the need to be superior. When we walk together in love, we don't cast shadows on each other. We give each other light. 

That's what I've been thinking about this morning.*

*Note: I actually wrote this yesterday morning and then forgot to post it. Oops.