“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
For me, Martin Luther King Jr. and love always go hand-in-hand. As I’ve been going about the day, remembering his life and his impact on our world, I keep coming back to the subject of love. So much of what I’ve heard in my life focuses on loving your neighbor or your enemy, but I think the root of all that is really love of self. Many of us that grew up with the bible can easily recall “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” but I almost wonder if it should have been “love yourself so you can love your neighbor.”
I can only think that if we loved ourselves more, it would be impossible to treat others so poorly. What do you think? Should we really be focusing more on loving ourselves and let the rest follow?
When I was growing up, pretty much the only way to hear your favorite song was via the radio. I didn’t have a lot of disposable income to buy any album I wanted, not even those singles that came out on cassette tape. I remember just listening to the radio in hopes of hearing that one song and stopping everything just to listen to the whole thing or belting it out with friends as we cruised around looking for something to do.
I parked the car and turned off the engine but left the radio on. A song was playing and it had that perfect balance of hopeful and sad. And we were both wrapped up in it, hands held together like we were two high school kids falling in love. Just us, in the car, the heat slowly dissipating around us as the music played on. There was nowhere else to be and nothing more important than hearing how it ended, together. We didn’t need to speak or maybe we just didn’t have anything to say that could be more important than listening. With the melody, my mind wandered from dinner, to the winding highway along the coast, sliding in and out of wisps of fog, and back to that parking lot. The hopeful parts of the song took me back to three kids sleeping a hundred miles away, our day together, and intertwined somehow in there too, was something like sadness. Like words left unsaid or regret. Then back to you, the car, the cold closing in and our hands getting sweaty together. A perfect moment that’s hard to let go of. The music stopped and we paused just enough for a breath, knowing that we eventually had to let go of each other’s hand and get out of the car.