Love After Love
The time will come
When, with elation
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other’s welcome
And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you
All your life, whom you ignored
For another, who knows you by heart
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your own image from the mirror.
Sir. Feast on your life.
-Derek Walcott
Everyone always talks about the concept of self-love, and we all hear the clichéd sayings passing around about it. In their nebulous and slightly cheesy way, these sayings often resemble salty mashed potatoes made out of a box on Thanksgiving.
“Love yourself,” they say. “You will never be able to love anyone until you love yourself.”
But what exactly is ‘self-love?’ Does it mean that we wake up in the morning and wrap our arms around ourselves, looking in the mirror and mouthing the words “I love you” to our sleep-tossed faces? Does it mean we treat ourselves to shopping sprees and crazily expensive Chloe bags? Does it mean we practice yoga, teach ourselves about discipline and harmony, learn about buddhism and meditation? When people say it is internal, what does that mean? Or is self-love something that can’t be pinpointed, because some of us just have it and some of us just don’t? And where does self-love cross into narcissism? Are these two related?
Someone once told me an analogy that put it slightly into perspective for me. They key to self-love, the psychologist said, is to separate yourself into two parts, a parent and her child. Our frustrations, and problems often appear from the child’s perspective. In order to love ourselves, we must address the child’s problems from the perspective of the loving parent. And yet we are still ourselves.
http://www.soul-awakening.com/quotes/quotes-self-worth.htm
This website is interesting; it introduces the concept that the reason we have such difficulty self-loving is two fold- because we have been taught to accept other’s assessments of as as fact, and because we have also been taught that to love oneself is vain, selfish, egotistical.
What does everyone else think? What is self-love, and how is it acquired?
I have opened up a forum for this in the Meezoog forums, because I think it is a very esoteric and fascinating topic. So embrace some philosophy into your mundane work-day, and go talk to the Meezoog community about it!
