A Responsibility to Be Love in Order to Teach Love ❤️
Each day we should be readying ourselves for the responsibility it takes to become love, to hand over our egos in exchange for something more.
Visual Musing of SARFO EMMANUEL ANNOR
What’s good World-enders?
Put simply,
I have been trying to ignore my responsibility to be love in order to teach love. The best way I can show what is possible through centring a politics of mutual care, kindness and collaborative efforts is to be the embodiment of my beliefs. I realise that my responsibility to be love should take precedence over my calling to teach it.
I am on one of many roads to recovery. On this particular road, I am reconciling with my conceptualisation of love — I feel like many of us are.
Good. That’s a wonderful place to start.
Mirror of Intimacy Daily Reflections - Alexandra Katehakis
I am refining my definition to make way for a fuller life and a more rested, harmonious me. The old definition was limiting. The new love I am surrendering myself to demands to take up more space in the landscape of my existence. Whilst it demands more of me, it also delivers on its promise to add more and replenish all that has been lost to living a life without it. I am working on letting the love that I want to see and participate in spill beyond the realm of theory. I am deciding that the love I want is more than an abstract idea. It is a new direction that consumes the ones of old, a way of conduct that erases all that came before it, and a demeanour that holds all of me.
This is to say, stop treating love like a visitor, like a fleeting sensation. Should you decide on it, love will stay. Come to see it as the condition, the emotion, and the situation you constantly return to anytime a thing momentarily pulls you away. Let it be the place we are always planted in and speaking from. For love to be present it does not depend on anything but for you to decide that it will be.
Visual Musing of SARFO EMMANUEL ANNOR
As for myself, I am deciding on some new truths to bring me closer to where I want to go.
To meet love, I have decided that:
In romance, love is a way of life and not a performance. Our decision to love one another carefully and concisely is not something we should expect social media to have enough depth to carry.
In sisterhood, love is listening to a loved one when they ask to be seen as they are — not provided for, not guided, not monitored but just seen and held.
In life, I must relinquish control in exchange for a thing which is bigger than ego.
I am also coming to terms with the fact (because it is a solid fact) that there is enough love to hold me. I don’t need to choose whether to pour or be poured into because love is not scarce. It never was. There was always enough for me.
I’m also learning that loving someone doesn’t make it my responsibility to save them. That isn’t a burden love asks you to take on. “I love you” does not mean “I am here to save you”. As an older sister whose entire life has often felt like a sort of self-sacrifice I am having to come to terms with the reality that love would never ask anyone to leave themselves behind. It does not ask you to choose between those you love and yourself because aren’t you also a person you love?
One of the ways I am showing myself love is through letting myself lean on others. It is a matter of believing that it is safe to openly need (love) here, to depend, to hold a hand out in hopes that a loved one will fill it. You are a burden to no one, loving you makes someone feel light.
Love as the Default
Love has never been my first response — at least not after my prepubescent years — reaching for the knife has.
So, my Commitment to Wellness looks like learning to make love my response and my default, as unnatural as it still feels sometimes. And as overwhelming and distressing as it can be to move towards something I don’t fully recognise and still have not fully grasped.
Choosing love looks like questioning the impulses that do not reflect the kind of person and the kind of influence you want to have on the world, rather than letting it go unchecked.
It looks like taking the time to unearth yourself and your relationship to the concept of love because you are deeply set on forward movement.
Exercise 1:
Questions I am currently unpacking and invite you to are:
What beliefs do I have about love and how has that belief filtered into/ shown up in my life?
Who has my mind decided is deserving of love and who has it decided is not? Why?
What are ways I fail to show up for myself because I have not quite had the full experience of being completely held by my own love?
All I know as I move towards it, as I make decisions that bring me closer to it, is that there is something more here. There is something bigger than what I’m used to that goes beyond the initial discomfort.
We are not yet used to
the fullness,
the openness,
the sacrifice of ego
love asks of us
— We will get there.
Visual Musing of SARFO EMMANUEL ANNOR
Exercise 2:
Part 1
Write a short list of ways that you have committed yourself to choosing love above all else that is personal to your life and day-to-day experiences:
(E.g When I’m angry at my partner instead of ignoring them and adding fire to the situation I will say “I want to talk to you when I know I can give you the respect and kindness you deserve so I’m going to walk away until I’ve calmed down”)
Part 2
Come back, review the part that these loving decisions play in serving both yourself and those around you:
(E.g My partner no longer feels hurt and angry because I’ve ignored them. Instead they feel seen and I don’t feel bad for not communicating. It’s become easier and swifter getting back to a place where we both feel happy and cared for. )
We’ve all heard the expression “toughen up” a lot, or at least some wildly unimaginative saying that echoes the sentiment. But maybe this time the answer isn't to toughen up.
Maybe this time the answer is to soften...
Visual Musing By SARFO EMMANUEL ANNOR
Here is a reminder that:
The things we love have been waiting to love us back,
The places we want to see are waiting patiently to be seen by us,
The love we so badly desire is waiting to be cultivated by none other than us.
As always, here is a gift of sound.
Take the lyrics personally and consider a new way to love that adds a deeper dimension to the way that you do now.
Wishing you all the love and light this world has to offer,
IamKia.K ♥
Thank you so much for this♥️
Thank you for connecting with this piece. I hope to create many more which reach you in this way ❤️