Tell me if you can honestly say you're against any of these things, that you would, if given the choice, choose its opposite: World peace. Global literacy. Good health care. True love.
You can't, right? I don't think anyone in the entire world would argue against any of those things, really. Wouldn't we all be better off if we had an end to war? Wouldn't it better if everyone had enough to eat? Shouldn't every human have access to good medical care? Politics aside, the answer is a resounding yes. We'd all love a world like that.
And yet here we are: We still have war, we still have poverty, and even in the United States, we still have obstacles in the way of health care -- despite the fact that we all, deep down, want the opposite.
Back to the true love part. A lot of advice about how to find true love can be distilled to this: Don't look outward, look inward. Make yourself ready for it. Don't sit quietly with your dreams and ideas and wait for The One to wave a magic wand and animate them. Do the hard work of creating the life you want yourself, and then you'll be deserving of and ready for the partner you want.
This week I was watching an interview with Elizabeth Gilbert, author of a travel memoir of heartbreak and healing, Eat, Pray, Love, when the similarity between finding true love and healing the world struck me. In the interview, Elizabeth talks about what would have happened had she met her love, Felipe, at the beginning of her sometimes grueling, year-long journey of self-transformation rather than at the end. He would have been invisible to me, she said. She had to make herself deserving of the love that would make her happy, a good fit for that companionship, or she would have missed it.
We can't just say we want true love, then go through each day doing nothing about becoming more like the one we want to attract. In the same way, we can't just say we want peace, we want an end to suffering, we want all children to have health care and receive an education, and not live in a way that would make it more likely to happen. To make ourselves more deserving of that world. A better fit for it. Someone who helps it into being.
In the past six months, I've been trying to live more toward that end. I've been paying more attention to media that helps, not media that hurts, even though I find myself really tempted to read the salacious details of the latest kidnapping or murder. I take in and share less gossip, even though it's really tempting to want to know what's going on in the latest celebrity divorce (and sometimes I fail at resisting this). I have deliberately been complaining less, and forcing myself to look for the good instead, even though I am someone who loves, loves, loves a good rant. And I'm working on HumanKind, something that nourishes me as much as I hope I nourish it, even though I find myself shy of laying out my own thoughts on paper for everyone to read, and shy of asking people to do something like donate a mosquito net. (There, I did it.)
In the interview, Elizabeth says she leads a life now that "looks like me, that feels like me," a life that includes true love. As hard as the process was, she created the world she wanted by slowly and deliberately and sometimes painfully becoming the kind of person she most wanted to be.
I can do that. You can do that. If we are deliberate about the everyday choices we make -- in what we read, what we watch, what we buy, how and when we give -- we will create a world in which we create and attract peace, prosperity, and equality, for everyone. A healed world.
Liz was co-founder of HumanKind Media. You can read about her here
Stumble It!
