Valentine’s Day and Loving Awareness
This must be the oddest holiday. For some, it’s the one day when we make an effort to reach out and let our special sweetheart know how dear they are to our heart.
Similar to my take on Christmas, I find that it’s much nicer to think of every day as Valentine’s Day.
There are some things we can neglect in this world, and others that we can’t. If we leave the pancakes on the burner too long, they’ll let us know in a matter of minutes. But people, immersed as they are in their own concerns and worries, often don’t notice that they’re being neglected – until the sense of separation has built up to such a degree that they finally wake up one morning and feel like all the romance has been extinguished.
Valentine’s Day is about giving attention to those we love. We often try to do this with externals, like cards or chocolates or enormous bouquets of flowers. But the real magic of everyday-Valentine’s-Day is just plain old regular attention. The sort of attention where our loved one can see that we’re not distracted by something else when they are around.
This distraction is a constant habit for most of us – and it becomes so all-pervasive that we can all but ignore the most precious things in our lives, until sickness or death or divorce threatens to pull them away from us.
But attention can seem difficult. There are so many things in each day, each one vying for our energy and focus. The things that we think will last forever – like our loved ones – can easily be brushed aside for the more ‘pressing’ concerns of paying bills, attending to our work, or even watching the television.
Simple awareness – and breaking our habits of distraction – not only allows us to focus real, genuine attention on our loved ones, but it allows us to focus real, genuine attention on all aspects of our lives. This breaks the cycle of self-defeat we usually engage in – where we worry so much about something that we ignore what the situation is really presenting to us. Concerns about the imaginary future, worries about what we’ve done in the past – these overwhelm our minds so that the present – the Now – is totally lost to us.
People know when we’re really engaged with them. And this is the sort of attention that every person we love deserves in every moment that we’re doing something with them. They also know when our eyes are filled with that glassy half-awareness which says ‘I’m hearing you, but I’m not really listening’.
Perhaps simple Awareness is the answer – a way that we can give people love in each and every moment. This can’t come from the head – it has to come from the heart. But if it’s real, we can find our lives filled with more love than we could ever have imagined possible.
Awareness begets Awareness, and in the end, if we can allow our Awareness to really see each moment as it unfolds, we’ll find that Awareness also opens the door to perfect, vivid, and joyous love.
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