The spontaneity of love
I live in Los Angeles. When I walk around, there are many humans who ask me for spare change (or sometimes/usually it’s just company they need).
I’ve sometimes thought of this as like paying taxes or dues.
But treating that as a rule to follow, like “bring a dollar with me and give it to the first person who asks,” doesn’t feel wholly right, and I am writing to explore why.
The feeling is that it removes something of the spontaneity of love. It makes love a pattern rather than alive. Aliveness has the entirety of the present available to it. All my senses, my conditions, the world’s conditions, and the quality of the connection between my heart and another’s. If I committed to a rule beforehand, I would be limiting constricting love’s discernment on the matter.
Love is spontaneous—that is where alive is. A choice made beforehand can be true but its aliveness will only be as present as the rule. That said, to make spontaneity a rule of love seems to lead one into a paradox:
As a rule, love is spontaneous, but spontaneity is not a rule of love.
There is also the gift of a rule, a boundary.
When I notice I am withholding myself from a person I encounter on the street, it is often because I fear I will feel obligation.
Reserving the ability to say no is a good rule. If I have trouble saying no, then practicing saying no as a rule for some period of time may be a good rule. And it serves as an invitation: the spontaneity of whether or how to engage has nothing to do with money and becomes entirely a matter of the connection itself—which I believe to be of much greater value to the both of us.
Sometimes my heart hardens under all sorts of fears when I am approached by a stranger—and yet, often, it is a conversation with that very stranger that helps me to see how it is me behind the making of my fear.
The spontaneity of love is vulnerable. It means making my person and personality available to another.
“Even somebody I don’t trust?” I ask.
What is it that I fear in giving the truth of my person to a stranger?
“That they will abuse it and make use of it to take advantage of me.”
Vulnerability is neither weakness nor strength. It is a universal condition, and it is a choice. Without it, there is no room to be affected by another, and one cannot truly affect another without being open to being affected by that backaction of one’s affecting. When I seek invulnerability, I also lose something of myself. I cut myself off from you and you from me. But…
Vulnerability has gradations. It can be discerned and integrated. And sometimes, what feels vulnerable is different from what makes me actually vulnerable.
Like spontaneity, to make vulnerability a rule of love feels wrong. Yet, as a rule, when I have been shown the love of another, I was given the gift of their person and their unwithheld vulnerability, even if not total.
I’ll end on a question: What is the difference between total vulnerability and unwithheld vulnerability?