Myths and Legends

23th September 2013
Love – In Other Words (1961) [Extracts]

By Harper Lee

[...] What is love? Many things are love--indeed, love is present in pity, compassion, romance, affection. One thing identifies love and isolates it from kindred emotions: love admits not of self.

[...] Few of us achieve compassion; to some of us romance is a word; in many of us the ability to feel affection has long since died; but all of us at one time or another- be it for an instant or for our lives- have departed from ourselves: we have loved something or someone. Love, then is a paradox: to have it, we must give it. Love is not an intransitive thing; ­love is a direct action of mind and body.

Without love, life is pointless and dangerous. Man is on his way to Venus, but he still hasn't learned to live with his wife. Man has succeeded in increasing his life span, yet he exterminates his brothers six million at a whack. Man now has the power to destroy himself and his planet: depend upon it, he will - should he cease to love.

Having at long last realized that he must love or destroy himself, man is proceeding along his usual course by trying to evolve a science for it. The ultimate aim of psychoanalysis, when its special brand of semantics is put to rout, is to release man from his neuroses and thus enable him to love, and man's capacity to love is measured by his degree of freedom from the drives that turn inward upon him. As one holds down a cork to the bottom of a stream, so may love be imprisoned by self: remove self, and love rises to the surface of man's being.

With love, all things are possible.

Love restores. We have heard many tales of love's power to heal, and we are skeptical of them, for we are human and therefore prone to deny the existence of things we do not understand and cannot explain.

[...] Love transforms. Why is it that the quotidian we are seeking, when we can't find it in the Bible or in Shakespeare, most often turns up in Don Quixote? Because Cervantes, from sheer love of life, made the nuances of life immortal.  

[...] Every creation of man's mind that has withstood the buffeting of time was born of love--love of something or someone. It is possible even to love mathematics.

[...] Love purifies. Suffering never purified anybody; suffering merely intensifies the self-directed drives within us. Any act of love, however--no matter how small--lessens anxiety's grip, gives us a taste of tomorrow, and eases the yoke of our fears. Love, unlike virtue, is not its own reward. The reward of love is peace of mind, and peace of mind is the end of man's desiring. [END]

26th October 2012

Always carry a Cinderella princess with magical breeze inside yourself, so you will make your days a piece of fairy tale among the hustle and bustle of grey asphalt...


27th October 2012

Of love, pain and stamina...



Author: Helen Hayes
Source: www. counselling-psychotherapy-london.co.uk

I noticed this piece of street art in east London a few months ago (this photo is from the South Bank Global Poetry System website: http://gps.southbankcentre.co.uk/poems/1970/lets_adore_and_endure_each_other), and it led me to think about human relationships, how they really are a mixture of adoring and enduring one another.  It seems to me that if we have either too much or not enough of either adoration or endurance, then a relationship is in difficulty.

Popular images and narratives of romance would tell us that adoration is everything.  When the true lovers come together, it’s happy ever after.  That’s where the story ends or the film credits begin to roll.  But this is far from the truth of everyday life.  The glow of romance does fade, even if it never entirely disappears, and other qualities are needed- companionship, respect, tolerance, and sometimes a gritty determination to stick at it, even when the going is tough.

But too much endurance and not enough adoration results in an existence of unhappy resignation.  We fall short of ourselves- what the existential philosopher Martin Heidegger called ‘existential guilt’- if we settle for a sort of everyday dullness, putting up with a situation that makes us miserable because we’re afraid to make changes, whether to rediscover the spark of adoration which was once there or to accept, sadly, that a relationship might need to end.  It might be that economic, family, or cultural circumstances mean that the only option we have is to stay and endure one another, in which case, we might need to find ways of making our life meaningful in other areas.

What is less often realised, however, is that, despite the romantic Hollywood scripts, too much adoration is not necessarily a good thing. Many artists and poets have sought to describe the experience of falling in love as a sort of ‘madness’.  Certainly, the dizzy infatuation of the early days of a passionate love affair can leave us feeling disoriented, out of control, and delirious with excitement.  We might feel like we have left the earth and are floating heavenwards. But if we stay too long in the clouds, we are at risk of losing ourselves in our desire for the other- what many psychologists would call an ‘obsession’.  Excessive adoration of another person can result in our feeling less than ourselves, rather than more.  We become overly preoccupied with the other person, her or his feelings, wishes, needs, to the extent that we lose touch with our own.  We are also likely then to idealise the other and have expectations of her/him which cannot possibly be met.  We are bound to be disappointed. Then we have to learn again that the real hard work of living and loving is to temper adoration with endurance.

Therapy is a good place to work out for yourself where is your optimal balance of adoration and endurance.  Are you settling for less than you need? Are you less tolerant and more starry-eyed than is conducive to good relationships? These are the sorts of questions that it can be hard to voice, but valuable to explore in a safe and confidential therapeutic relationship where you can clarify your own values, needs, and priorities.

18th October 2012

That thing called LOVE...

According to Wikipedia, we can extract five main quick notions to explain what the word "LOVE" means to us, human beings:

1. Love is an emotion of a strong affection and personal attachment.

2. Love is also said to be a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection —"the    unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another". 

3. Love may describe compassionate and affectionate actions towards other humans, one's self or animals. 

4. Love in its various forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts. 

5. Love may be understood as part of the survival instinct, a function to keep human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species.

Well, as far a I know, love could not be, but taste as a passionate kiss under the rain of glory days...

Breakfast at Tiffany's, by Blake Edwards, with Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard, 1961

Let's wait for rainy days to come then...

And for the music:

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