Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Loving and caring

You can care for something without loving it. You can love something without caring for it. The most satisfying relationships are both loving and caring. I say relationships, even though I include some inanimate objects. We can have a relationship with a house, a car, a garden, even with a process.

You can love your first car while you give it no care whatsoever. A friend of mine was a committed 'non-materialist' and even during those first heady days of car ownership he refused to service his beloved alfa-romeo, what he called 'being materially invested in things'. The car was always breaking down - and not just because it was a late 70s alfa!

I've head some jobbing gardeners don't actually love gardening or plants - they just care for them. My inner romantic suspects that the plants don't grow as well if they're not loved, but it's true that love without care doesn't work on most plants.

When I have a massage, especially with a new masseur, I find it interesting and relaxing to be comforted by the competent care I'm receiving, care which is totally divorced from love. This care is also totally divorced from how good you are at your day job, how charming or good-looking you are, and how much you earn. You receive the care because you paid for it, that's the only essential qualification.

Baking bread is a process, as you mix the dough and knead it and watch it rise, and punch it down, and watch it rise again, then bake it. It's a process you can have a relationship with. You have to care (a bit) for it to work, and I think it's possible to feel a sort of love for the alchemy of it all.

Yet when it comes to our most precious personal relationships, I think we find it easy to focus on the love we feel. We feel caring, but we don't always take care. Giving care is, ultimately, about the needs of those we love. It is not necessarily caring to encourage others to depend on us to solve all their problems. It is not necessarily caring to indulge the poor choices our loved ones make. The impulses of our affection too often inspire us to give the care which is easiest or most obvious, the care that suits our own agenda. We give love, and we give the care we want to give, rather than the care those we love really need.

This is post 41 of 100 posts in 100 days.

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