How to live and how to love

I have quoted the late author Charles Bowden several times in this blog. I admire both his unusual prose style, which often is like an extended, barely controlled, jazz riff, a cri de coeur, but also the intensity of his thought and, most of all, his ability to face (without blinking, turning away, or wincing) the sharp-edged realities that underlie modern life. In Desierto, the first book of his that I read and one I am in the process of rereading, he writes, “I try to construct a theory of how a moral person should live in these circumstances and how such a person should love.”

Wow. How to live in these times is hard enough as we wrestle with the increasing complexity of our society, uncertainty about what the near future will bring for ourselves and our children, the vague and real threats that fill the news, and the distractions that blind and deafen us to what our own souls are trying to tell us. And yet, in addition to the question of how to live a moral life in these circumstances, Bowden also is talking about a challenge that is even more difficult: how to love.

Perhaps the questions of how to live and how to love are one, for to really live, we must engage with others—after all, we are social animals, and connection is part of our genetic makeup. To truly engage with others, however, means breaking down the barriers that separate us and seeking closeness in our relationships, a familiarity that is based on trust, appreciation, and respect. Yet, the essence of love is that same relationship towards others, whether it is romantic, familial, between friends, or even the close connections with acquaintances with whom we associate.

Achieving this sort of connection with another person requires several actions: recognition, connection, understanding, and finally empathy. Underlying these actions is the willingness to be vulnerable so that we can connect with one another person to person, soul to soul—the sort of intimacy that Buber refers to as an I-thou relationship.

Of course, recognizing and accepting our vulnerability is difficult. As we live our lives and travel through society, we continually encounter uncertainties and even threats, real and imagined. Thus, to cope, we try to protect ourselves and avoid feeling vulnerable. We do this by maintaining a distance, physical and psychological, between ourselves and the unknown. While necessary to some extent, this attitude encourages us to see other people as a series of objects, creating the sort of impersonal relationships so common in school, employment, and business and that are the antithesis of a moral and loving life.

The key to achieving a level of intimacy is to recognize the tendency in ourselves and in others to impersonalize and to generalize, to objectify others. If we stop to consider the challenges that we each face in getting through the day, the week, the year, we can begin to see that bosses are not merely bosses; they are human beings who have their own struggles about which we know little or nothing. The same goes for impersonal doctors, mediocre teachers, bored students, rude clerks, newcomers from other countries, beggars at traffic lights, and so on. Recognizing the universal humanity of others makes it easier to try to connect with them instead of ignoring or treating them dismissively. It makes it easier to greet strangers on a morning bike ride, ask a Spock-like doctor why she chose her specialty, have patience with a disorganized server in a busy restaurant, sympathize with a mother struggling with a couple of crying children, strike up a conversation with an old guy sitting on a bench at a bus stop.

Back to Bowden, a moral life infused with love requires intentionally pursuing those four actions of intimacy—recognition, connection, understanding, and empathy. I recognize, of course, that society is impersonal and often feels Darwinian, that getting through the day often can be damned hard, and that the ideas I suggest sound like internet platitudes that litter Facebook posts. In fact, I am working on a short essay that I intend to post on struggling between idealism and the hard reality of daily existence and the challenge of holding onto one’s ideals when it seems that almost everyone else has surrendered to a soulless pragmatism.

Nevertheless, I think my answer to Bowden’s challenge is useful because intimacy is like a gravitational field that draws us together. Seeking intimacy is truly how a moral person should love.