Everyone likes to be appreciated and loved, but there is something more than both of these that people seem to hanker after.
What is the one thing that people want more than being thanked and loved? It is feeling heard and being "needed". Mark Twain once said "I can live on a compliment for a month".
Being needed has nothing to do with being loved. If we love someone it is for their sake. When we need someone, it is for our sake.
Why is this? Do we have a hole in our heart that we can never be fulfilled?
The need to be needed is the most prevailing illnesses in our society and yet we have no name for it. Being constantly eager to have our ego fed by being noticed, acknowledged, complimented, liked... such neediness is the root of hardship. It is an addiction of our own imagination. It is beyond belief.
Spending our lives propping up our own false sense of certainty in a life that consists of two noble truths - we are imperfect and we are impermanent, is wasting precious time that we can ill afford to spill.
Paying attention to and expecting compliments is the opposite of love. Feedling off compliments is a selfishness borne out of an shallow sense of who we are, an ignorance of the beauty that resides in our lives and all around us. We should not take our selves so seriously.
Waiting for others to acknoweldge what we should already know is no more than worshiping our own idle vanity. Embracing truth involves both facing our limitations and accepting our nobility. Without excuse, explanation, justification, shame or blame.
Our strengths and weaknesses reside within us side by side, we are big enough to embrace both. We do not need to justify or be justified.
Let not my love be call’d idolatry
Nor my beloved as an idol show,
Since all alike my songs and praises be
To one, of one, still such, and ever so.
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence;
Therefore my verse, to constancy confin’d,
One thing expressing, leaves out difference.
Sonnet CV (105)
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