Seeing Love

Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love.

- Thich Nhat Hanh

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I first came across that quote when I was writing I Dream He Talks to Me. I had gone down a wormhole of reading about what it really is to understand someone. I’m always looking for ways to understand the needs and wants of my son, John Henry, who stopped using spoken language when he was about a year and a half old. He was, soon after that, diagnosed with Level 3 Autism. His challenges to communicate are simultaneously my challenges to understand how to be the best parent I can be for him, so I’m constantly doing what I call detective work — looking very closely at his movements and moods, sitting beside him quietly so I might have some telepathic moments, and doing the tangible things as well, of course — encouraging use of the AAC device and signs — anything that might make what’s going on with him more clear.

The idea resonates: Understanding is love’s other name. Today is Valentine’s Day, and I’m thinking of it in the context of my marriage. How can I properly love my husband if I don’t understand him? Like all couples, we’ve had our share of misunderstanding, that’s for sure, and it’s almost a decade down the line that I’m starting to feel like I might be getting to know him a little bit and vice versa.

It’s no small thing.

We are wildly attracted to each other. It’s as if we have a forceful cosmic energy pulling us together that bewilders even us sometimes — in our darkest moments I know we’ve both looked at each other and thought what in the world am I doing with this lunatic? We’ve even both said so recently. I don’t think that makes us different from any couple who’s being honest. But we also both pretty immediately said but we’re here. We’re still here. There’s a reason, a purpose, and a big opportunity if we keep on working at this.

We’ve both done quite a bit of therapy. We both know that it is required. I also look very closely at his movements and moods. I sit beside him quietly so I might have some telepathic moments…

I’m kidding. Sort of. And certainly not making light of my son’s severe speech disability and the limitations it puts on the knowledge we can have of each other. But a lot of communication is non-verbal, y’all. I’ll also say humor is gold in this house. Sometimes we laugh to keep from crying as everyone does.

But I wonder about this: Do we call people to our lives so that we can ultimately begin to understand ourselves through trying to understand them? Once we do understand the other person in the ways that we can and we’ve developed compassion and real empathy for that person, and we’ve gone through all of those processes to get there, whatever they are to us as individuals, which leads to self-understanding (because we’ve done the work on ourselves and with the other person that is required to find real intimacy) then lo and behold does that self-understanding turn to self-love, which is required to properly love another? Is it a circle? An ouroborous?

Goodness. That sounds like a lot. And when you have to drill down so far through self-loathing to get to that self-love, it is a lot. But I don’t know what the alternative is. I don’t want to live in struggle. I’m worn out with tussling with myself. So I’ve started doing the work that is required to live differently.

That process sometimes leads to circular thinking, which leads nowhere and everywhere all at once. As in most things, there is poetry to be found in even the maddening aspects of that truth. In this case, as far as the way I see it, is that the essence of love may be seeing that we are all connected then thinking and acting accordingly.

I think Valentine’s Day is a great holiday. I like gushy love, I like serious love, I like playful and flirty love, I like really old love, I like married love, committed love, friend love, familial love, platonic love, new love, I can even appreciate unrequited love — love, when it gets down to it, is hope, isn’t it?

a few watercolor cards I painted this morning — the you tube tutorial is here

I hope your day is filled with love — not only the kind that is teaching you the most, but also the kind that keeps you warm and feeling cared for. Sometimes that can only be found within us.

I’m sending a lot of it to you today,

Allison