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| The Virtues of the Heart. Love put into practice |
Excerpt from the Book in Editorial: When I was a child I was taught to conjugate the verb to love at school as an example of a verb that everyone used and a verb that everyone should know its meaning. I love, you love, he loves, we love... No one ever explained to me the meaning of the verb to love and even less did they teach me to love. Perhaps my parents, my teachers, my church did not know how to love or what love was. In my life no one has ever said "I love you" to me and I to few people. In fact, we have changed the verb to love for the verb to want, which only really means I want you, I need you, I like you, I want to have you. In Spain we rarely hear this expression ("I love you") if it is not in a poetic context. Today everyone loves each other but no one, it seems, loves each other.
On the other hand, we use the word to love or love in various ways, which are more capitalist and commercial: I love your hairstyle, I love my car, I love women, I make love, I love money, I love everything that wears a skirt, I love doing love, I love your perfume and a long etcetera.
Everyone talks about love but no one knows what love is and even less how to love.
The dictionary attributes the meanings of sexual desire, carnal desire, love of neighbor, love of God, love a lot, feel passion, help, feel compassion, brotherly love, family love, love as a couple, fatherly love, I love my dog and many more. But neither does it explain how one loves, although there are certain hypotheses that range from
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spiritual to scientific. Also say that what is called brotherly, family or paternal love is usually the beginning of all wars. Jesus said that we should love our neighbor's child as our own child.
Despite this global insecurity about the meaning of the verb to love, it seems that everyone agrees that it is a feeling, and it is already something.
The definition of love according to the dictionary is "the act of loving" and there we stay, since it does not explain how to love. And if it doesn't explain how to love how we are going to love. What a definition!
Making love really means, although it is currently used in another context, courting, making someone else like you, trying to conquer.
Three points are clear:
Most of us humans have confused love with sexual desire and falling in love, I think since the dawn of civilization. Desire is selfish and "wanting to have" too, then it cannot be Love. Desire can create frustration, resentment, anger, violence... They have even dared to say that from love to hate there is only one step.
The society in which we live has made us believe, on the other hand, that love is associated with consumption and materialism: The more you have, the more they will love you, and people buy and buy to maintain a consumer society, a delusion, which does not makes you happy.
Third, we all need love and we all need to be loved but no one dares to ask for it. What is totally clear is that we all need "something" that we don't even know what it is...
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Get the Book "The Virtues of the Heart" (link), by Damián Alvarez
Visit his Author Page on Amazon Publisher (link)
