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The Power of Love

The Power of Love 2400 1350 Jason Stadtlander

I have written many poems and stories on love within this blog. Just look at the keywords to the left of this article to read some of them or use the search box.

I attempted to define love as best I could in “Love Is…“, and although I get a LOT of hits on the article, I still find it doesn’t do the word ‘love’ justice.

In a word – Love

Arabic: حُب
Bulgarian: любов
Chinese: 喜爱
Czech: láska
Danish: kærlighed
Dutch: liefde
Estonian: armastus
Finnish: rakkaus
French: amour
German: die Liebe
Greek: αγάπη
Hungarian: szeretet
Icelandic: ást
Indonesian: sayang
Italian: amore
Japanese: 愛
Korean:애정
Latvian: mīlestība
Lithuanian: meilė
Norwegian: kjærlighet
Polish: zamiłowanie
Portuguese: amor
Romanian: dragoste
Russian: любовь
Slovak: láska
Slovenian: ljubezen
Spanish: amor
Swedish: kärlek
Turkish: aşk

Those are just twenty nine of the roughly 6,500 spoken languages in our world. Every single language has a word for love. Some languages have multiple expressions of love within a single word. So the concept of love itself is far from alien to our species, but the ability to completely understand it is as complex as the ability to understand faith.

The Force of Love

When Obi-Wan Kenobi told Luke Skywalker to “trust in the force”, he spoke of a power that surrounds us. This power can also be compared to love and hate. Love, being the good side of the “force” and Hate being the “dark” side of the force. Love can consume us, support us and tear us apart.

~

A man sees a young woman in Grant Park in Chicago, finds her attractive and sits down at the bench next to her as she is feeding some pigeons and reading a book. He tries not to stare but admires how her long hair cascades over her shoulders and over her light jacket. Then his eyes trace down her arm to her delicate hands that hold the book. Sensing someone looking at her, she lowers her book and sees the dark-haired man with a five o’clock shadow, trying not to look at her but their eyes lock. It’s love at first sight.

As the days progress into weeks the two get to know each other and find multiple common the-power-of-love-jason-stadtlanderbonds. They grow closer and closer, and love becomes a comfort, a blanket that keeps them warm and carries them through each day. It’s the comfortable love of daily life.

One day, the woman gets a job that requires her to move back to France where she was raised. He goes with her temporarily to help her get established, intending to, and wanting to come join her when his own job will allow. They spend four beautiful weeks in France and she shows him sights that only the locals know, such as the markets of Marché St. Quentin and the historic movie theater of La Pagode. Then the day comes that he must go back to Chicago. His heart wrenches as he hugs and kisses her goodbye, never knowing when he will see her physically again and he walks through security at Charles de Gaulle Airport. The man forces himself to board the plane and talks with her on the phone until the flight attendant requests him to turn off the phone. He sits, staring out the window as the plane pulls away from the gate and for the first ten minutes, it feels as though someone has attached a cable to his heart and tethered it to the tarmac. For he breaks down, silently crying to himself as his heart is ripped from his chest. It’s the pain of love.

Love That Heals

Love has been shown to have healing properties. Holistic medicine firmly follows the idea that love has strong healing powers. In hospitals, it is now routine to use therapy animals. These are animals that are very good-natured and trained to be with the ill or injured patients and give them love such as the Comfort Dogs of Boston.

Sitting next to a loved one that is in a coma and talking to them is regular practice. Not only because it keeps the loved one in the lives of those that are conscious, but it has also been shown to help the patients heal.

Studies have shown that people who have someone to love or have someone who loves them, live longer than those who do not.

Love of a Child

To hold a brand new human in your arms, one that (ideally) has been created with someone you love, is overwhelming. The flood of undefinable emotions and the incredible reality that there is a new life in your world that will always be a part of you is a consuming love. As the days go on and you get to know this small life, this child, it knows how to do only four things; Eat, sleep, poop and love you (you like how I ordered those?). The love that a child shows for a parent is unconditional and conversely, the love that a parent has for the child is nurturing and encompassing.

Love Defined by a Child

In researching what love means, I came across a very amusing article that discusses how children define love. Here are five of my favorite children’s definitions of love:

  • “Love is what makes you smile when you’re tired.” Terri – age 4
  • “Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other.” Karl – age 5
  • “When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over and paint her toenails anymore.  So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too.  That’s love.” Rebecca – age 8
  • “If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate,” Nikka – age 6
  • “Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen,” Bobby – age 7

What does the power of  love mean to you?

The Power of Positive Thinking

The Power of Positive Thinking 150 150 Jason Stadtlander

Next in my “Power of Humanity” series this week, I am looking at the power of positive thinking, something that I don’t take enough time to do.

Positive thinking can best be defined as optimism, or a technique for changing your attitude in order to foster optimism.

It’s All In Your Head

More true than you know… optimism is a choice, sometimes a difficult one, that must be made in your mind. A choice to look past the bad things that are going on and the stress that is all around you and choosing to see the good, the light of the day rather than the shadows and darkness. Positive thinking is a mental attitude where you allow yourself to grasp words, images and see the good believing in favorable results in whatever you are doing. That in turn, leads to feeling good about yourself and giving you more strength to think positively. It can become a (good) chain reaction.

Winston S. Churchill said in his book “My Early Life“: “The positive thinker sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible.

No truer words were ever spoken.

How Can Positive Thinking Change Your Life?

Optimism comes from the Latin word optimus, which means ‘best’. Those that are optimistic are always looking for the best in a situation and expecting good things to happen. It is a belief, but no more different from that of a pessimist who believes that the bad things will happen.

If you believe that good things will happen, then they will. Perhaps not today, or even tomorrow, but eventually. They may not be the things you were hoping would happen, but if you have that positive attitude, then you will see the good things that are happening rather than dwell on the bad.

The Power of Positive ThinkingHaving positive thought or optimism really comes down to how you talk to yourself, believing that your actions will have positive results and it also requires (and creates) a level of trust in yourself that such actions will be positive. An optimist doesn’t believe in ‘luck’ but rather that they make their own luck. That if you work hard on something and persevere, good things will come of it. They realize that the positive events in their life are not simply flukes, but are tangible results of the inevitable progress of their own actions.

In studies, positive thinking has actually shown to decrease depression, decrease stress and increase your life span. In the link in the previous sentence, the researches state that

It’s unclear why people who engage in positive thinking experience these health benefits. One theory is that having a positive outlook enables you to cope better with stressful situations…

Which makes complete sense. Stress has been shown to have devastating physical effects on the body as well as the mind. Keeping a positive mind, focuses on the good and the less stressful points in life.

Two Words, Two Results

Optimist: A person who looks at the good in life and focuses on the positive, expecting favorable results. They believe that their actions will eventually have good results.

Pessimist: A person who blames themselves for the bad things that happen in their lives and thinks that one mistake means more will inevitably come. They believe that positive events are flukes.

Which are you?

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The Power of Friendship

The Power of Friendship 150 150 Jason Stadtlander

This week I’m going to create a series called “The Power of Humanity“. I will choose a few topics to focus on and expand upon them. The first of which, is friendship.

I have been struggling with the concept of friendship the past few months. Trying to understand the boundaries, the necessity and the impact that friends can have on our lives. I would be lying if I said that friendship is no longer an enigma to me, but I also feel as though I have a bit more of an understanding.

I have good friends, bad friends and everything in between. What I have found is, that friendship itself is both selfless and selfish. Before you go off stating that I am just talking about a bunch of canceling out jibberish, here me out.

One of my best friends recently told me when I was discussing the concept of friendship that: “You meet people for a reason, a season or a lifetime.”

The Power of FriendshipThis sounded trite to me at first, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

Friendship is a give and take. We need our friends at times and our friends need us at other times. Sometimes the “take” is much more than the “give”, which depending on the giver, they can either handle being a support structure, or they cannot. I will admit that given my life the last two years, I’ve done much more taking than giving (and to my dearest friends I apologize profusely). However, I think they know that I will be happy to reciprocate that in turn.

Best friends, Close friends and Acquaintances

I can divide my friends into three categories and then I divide acquaintances into three subcategories:

1. Best friends
2. Close friends
3. Acquaintances
a. Those that I need to associate with for networking reasons
b. Those that I don’t like, but need to keep an eye on (they say keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer)
c. Those that I care about, but don’t know well

Aside from the obvious (family), there are nine people in this world that I would lay down my life for. Two of which I almost never speak with anymore for one reason or another, but I still hold them very strong as a friend and though they might not know it, I’d do anything for them.

There are is a large group of people that I would help out if they were in need and reached out to me. These are people that I consider close friends but perhaps not my best friends. Then there are acquaintances that I am associated with, respect and consider them good people. However, these people have either not had enough contact with me or have not attempted to communicate with me enough to gain the respect that a close friend deserves.

Why have friends?

A simple, but extremely complicated question.
1. They understand how you think. True friends, know how you tick psychologically. They can temper you and can help you make a decision that your own perspective prevents you from seeing.
2. Friends lift you up. In a time of need, friends know what makes you happy, they know how to help change your mood. (Consequently, if friends become enemies, they also know your weaknesses.)
3. Life long friends shape your life. Friends that you have had for most of your life, shape your interests, your social interactions and teach you about important life skills.
4. Friends can help you define your priorities. The old saying “birds of a feather flock together” is true. You will tend to attract to people similar to you. Your friends can help you protect yourself because they also fall into the same traps you do.
5. They prevent loneliness. Loneliness can be painful, we are social creatures.
6. They support you through thick and thin. As time goes on, we are always pruning our friendship tree here and there. It’s the branches that are there through all the pruning that are your strongest friends. They will be there for you no matter what you do or what happens.

The reality is, we need friendship. Even those that claim they don’t need it – yep… they need it. They are just too stubborn to admit it.

Friends play a key role in our ability to be individuals, a community and a society as a whole. If you have friends, cultivate the ones that cultivate you and remember, they say to ‘Do unto others as you’d have done to yourself’. That does not mean you should be doing harm to those that have done it to you… your job is not to pay people back for the wrong doings they do. That is up to God. But if you have a friend who is there for you, through thick and thin, be there for them through their hardest times and they will carry you through their (and your) happy times as well.

What do your friends mean to you?

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