Love Harder

<p style=”clear: both”>The mantra at violin lessons this week was “simple, not easy.” Which, you know, always. It is a week, apparently, for sorting through priorities and commitments and experiencing dramas that are not my own to write about, and of course I have realizations about how I am living, about what I want from life, and they sound so simplistic as to be completely trite and banal. Which, I know if I get it right, it’s going to be simple, not easy. I take a risk of being all publicly trite/banal as well as the risk of being offensively vague about the nature of the week’s drama, because I need this as a place to lodge reminders to myself, a place where I can set down ideas for when I need return to them. The big one right now, though, is that in order to do anything I have to practice a sort of fearlessness. That at those moments when I have had to confront some of my failures and it hurts resoundingly the courage to stand up to it and not keep running has come from having had loving interactions with friends and family, and deciding to be equal to that love. You know the old thing about how the opposite of love is not hate but indifference? Experience points instead at the opposite of love being fear. Parenting, I have tried to tell my children more often what they should be doing instead of what they shouldn’t, tried to remember to ask them to walk instead of telling them not to run; I try to do this for myself now, and instead of saying “don’t be so fearful” I encountered these words hanging from the eaves of a porch yesterday, and “Love Harder” does precisely what I need right now.