All you need is love

All You Need Is Love (Across The Universe) – YouTube

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLcC0os5ZR0

The Beatles – All You Need Is Love-HQ – YouTube

www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-pFAFsTFTI

If you did not read this weeks New York Times Sunday Review, titled, “The Value of Suffering” by Pico Iyer, it is an incredible and thoughtful piece.  In summary, he writes that suffering brings clarity, suffering keeps us from taking ourselves seriously, and in some cases suffering is a privilege because “it moves us toward thinking about essential things and shakes us out of shortsighted complacency… a hidden blessing.”

We all suffer, some more than others.  Some have a higher threshold for it, but it is in all our lives, a fact of life.   If you read Laura Hildebrands book “Unbroken” you discover an inspirational  true story of Louie Zamperini–a juvenile delinquent-turned-Olympic runner-turned-Army hero. During a routine search mission over the Pacific, Louie’s plane crashes into the ocean, he is almost eaten alive by sharks,  he survives only to be taken prisoner and spend the next 15 years in a Japanese POW camp. He is brutally tortured and starved.   Few human beings could  endure what he endured, yet he survives, without anger or bitterness.  And he survives with his humanity and dignity intact.

None of our lives will ever be this hard, yet many of us are broken again and again by life’s curve balls.

Last weekend I flew down to Austin, Texas to say good-bye to my college room-mate from UVA who is dying of cancer.  She has suffered enormously these past 5 years, and may not make it to her 50th birthday celebration in two weeks. But there she was radiant and happy to see us without even a hint of bitterness in her body. With grace and humor she spoke to each of us.  She had a message.  “Let go of the detritus of life, the crap, the fights…none of that matters.”  she repeated  her message while we were each at her bedside.  So of course we asked her,  then what does matter?   And Diane’s simple answer?.  “All you need is THE LOVE.”   Focus on the love, she advised, and the suffering goes away. Diane is an unemotional Texan that loved a stiff drink, a good party and a raunchy joke.  To be this sentimental was not like her.  She even kissed me on the lips as I left.

Diane’s message was simple, but it moved my friends and I profoundly.  The love does not pay the mortgage, or make the sick heal, or stop you from having a fight with your husband, or  prevent an accident on your way to work or worse, the love does not stop brutal acts of war.  But it can be a state of mind with which to fight all the daily suffering in our lives and in our world.  Ghandi and Martin Luther King  preached it, but we all still seem to need to be reminded again and again.

And in this context, I realize that my journey with Leta is all about THE LOVE.  She is a walking 3 foot 2 inches , non-verbal ball of love and love is all she wants to share with everyone.   If I allow myself to focus on the other stuff; the medical challenges, the chaos, the things that get broken in my house, the fighting, the sleep deprivation.  And I often do, then I  miss the forest for the trees.  Leta and my friend Diane are my reminders to not take myself too seriously and to remember what is truly essential in this life.  It always comes back to the love.  The love of your friends, your children, your spouse, your parents and even strangers on the street.  We all do better just knowing that it is there.

2 thoughts on “All you need is love

  1. Mary Dillon says:

    Lainey this is wonderful. I hung on every word. It is so true that our suffering brings us clarity and closer to what truly matters, the love, the love, it’s all about the love my friend. Diane would be so proud to see this and I felt my heart strangely warmed as I read it. Leta has a great mom and I have a great friend. Love you.

  2. karen grau says:

    I am going to repost this blog entry again and again over time. Too often, we take these words to heart, only to forget them when our next “crisis” comes calling. Your college friend is as lucky to have you as you are to have her. Thanks for reminding us what’s important. I adore you.

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