Tag: healing

  • Love Education

    Love Education

    None of us is shown or taught how to love, but we should be. We may learn facts and skills in life, but rarely do we learn the deeper skill of loving. We can choose to live without sex, but we can’t live without love. How to love deeply and broadly is what we need—and what the Earth needs too. We must learn how to love strangers, how to love nature, and how to love everything we encounter.

    Our goal in life should be to make love. Not just in the romantic or physical sense, but in the way we move through the world. We can learn to live in love without being in love. Turning living into loving is a lifelong path.

    Yet society’s idea of love often misleads us. We are taught that love is something that happens to us, a reaction when we encounter something “deserving” of love. But deep love is not a rare event to wait for—it is something we practice. Don’t wait for the big love. Love the ordinary people and the small things. Loving the ordinary makes it extraordinary. Saving your love until something better comes along is not loving at all.

    If your culture has taught you to hold back—to wait, to make sure who or whatever is “worthy” before you give love—what are you losing out on? Love is not a prize to be earned. Love is a decision. Love is action. Love is a choice you make again and again. And there is no need to be loved back in order to love.

    We should also be careful not to mistake love for its imitations. To seduce is to lead astray—to try to make someone become who we want them to be, instead of loving who they really are.

    True love goes deeper. True love is core love. True love is mutual love. We don’t simply fall in love—we practice love. To love takes energy, especially when love awakens feelings of powerlessness, helplessness, or vulnerability. Real love takes work.

    And yet, this work transforms us. When we are courageous enough to be ourselves with another, to grow and change together, love keeps growing. Passion can ripen into something more real when we dare to take the risk of loving fully. Because real love changes us.

    It is only when we dare to have our heart broken that we can truly love. True love gives and forgives.

  • We’re All Part of the Broken Family

    I read your words, and I felt something shift—not in the way I imagine you intended. You said what you needed to say, and I suppose this is me doing the same. Skriva av mig.

    You write with the tone of someone who’s already moved on, who’s emotionally detached and looking back at the wreckage from a safe, elevated distance. But I didn’t feel wisdom in your letter. I didn’t feel love. I felt something performative. Something self-satisfied. You used to be someone I admired for your depth—for your ability to hold contradictions, for your courage to look at the mess and not turn away. This felt like the opposite. This felt like someone writing to win a crowd, not seek the truth.

    You compared America to a mentally ill family member. That’s not philosophy, that’s pathologizing a people. That’s taking the worst of one nation and building a metaphor that makes everyone else the sane, stable, rational grownups. Europe becomes the wise wife. Canada, the pretty girl next door. Russia, the neighbourhood monster. And you? You’re the knowing observer, shaking your head in sorrow from your morally secure porch.

    You’ve written off an entire nation as if it’s a single consciousness—chaotic, erratic, no longer trustworthy. That’s not just lazy, it’s dangerous. It flattens the millions of people in that country who are fighting the good fight. Who are pushing back. Who are trying to hold something together while the ground shifts beneath them. You saw the storm, and instead of offering a rope, you stepped back to watch.

    And meanwhile, Europe—your golden child in this metaphor—gets a free pass. No mention of its own ongoing nationalism. No mention of how it’s leaned on the US for security, convenience, and political cover for decades. No mention of its own violent history or its complicity in the very global order you now denounce. It’s easier, I guess, to pretend Europe is rising like a phoenix while America flails.

    But this isn’t healing. This isn’t insight. It’s resignation dressed up as moral clarity.

    You say you haven’t given up on America, that your door is open. But everything in your letter says otherwise. You’ve already packed the bags, changed the locks, and started dating someone new. What remains is the guilt talking, not the love.

    I don’t say this as a flag-waver or an apologist. I see the mess. I feel the grief. But I also see the reductionism, the projection, the convenient forgetting. And that—coming from someone who claims to be a philosopher—is what stings the most.

    If you want to walk away, fine. But don’t pretend it’s out of compassion. And don’t pretend you’re not part of the same broken family.

    We all are.