The Many Kinds of Love

Oh, we make so ado about it: Platonic love, puppy love, unconditional love, mate
al love, filial love, patriotic love and, of course, romantic love.

And while unconditional motherly and filial love is often exulted as the premiere expression of bonded emotion and devotion, and while patriotic love is demanded of us, and while romantic love, temporarily blinded and blinding tempered naturally only through the passage of time, the love for our brothers and sisters, of our fellow human beings, that is often espoused, is often sadly lacking. How else could there be inhumanity at each flip of a TV channel: war, torture, starvation, intimidation, torment, cruelty, a nightly global phenomena. n
What does it mean anyway,” brotherly love?” It is the love, empathy, kindness, charity, compassion and sympathy that we should express toward our fellow man. How do we do this? Don’t we already have enough to do? I contend there is no other human responsibility, that extends also beyond our family and friends, than to appreciate the other creatures, no matter creed, color, religious affiliation, social, economic status, species, or whatever other category we have used to demark and to separate. This is an all-inclusive love.

And isn’t the dictum, “Love your brother as you love yourself!” While this is a religious dictum, it is, to me, less that and more a spiritual philosophy of how one might approach life. I would expand this idea to “All (living) things bright and beautiful; All creatures great and small.” Let us all be “wise and wonderful” and on this Valentine’s Day, a day of love, define love as universal and strive to put that kind of love each day into our lives for a more positive world: Yes, that, too begins with one small action, one small smile for another, and yes, you may laugh at the idea, that in this writer’s idealism, love can spread around the world like a disease – finally, a “bug” we don’t mind sharing, “the love bug.”

So maybe instead of wasting money on more stuff we claim to love this Valentine’s, let’s truly love another like we love ourselves.

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