Big Love

Fear can meet its match

I learned recently that fear is the opposite of love. This surprised me.

I hadn’t really spent any time considering what emotion was the opposite to that of love. But I had been afraid of losing love. When I did lose it one year ago, I suddenly had to confront that fear. Other things were lost too. I lost part of my personal narrative, who I was, how I thought of myself, how I was in the world. I lost my vision for the future. And I lost practical things, like money and assets.

Back to love. There are unsurprisingly different definitions for the word love. And I am no expert. To me love is a feeling that becomes tangible once felt.

I can define things that I love. Family is an obvious and clear place to start. I have two children who I dearly love. I love my parents, though my father is dead, our love is not. Friendship is another area of love and connection in my life. I am lucky to have some lifelong friends, some who I have known my whole life. Some I have not see in a long while, who I miss and love to this day. Who I am going to try to reconnect with in the new year. Then I have a few friends that I have made in my adult life.

Today, folding laundry, I thought about how I love to fold and put away my children’s laundry. I love to take care of them in that way, to think of them when I do this task.

Author Arthur Brooks has become an expert on happiness, teaching and writing on the topic. He has written on fear and love in his How to Build a Life column in The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/07/how-fight-fear-love/614227/) and he teaches about it in his Harvard edx course Managing Happiness. I took this course recently. Another thing that got my attention was something called the happiness curve, which from what I can tell is a relatively new finding. This was the outcome of a global study, that shows children below age 16 very happy, and then the happiness level drops, forming a U shape curve. It’s lowest in the 40’s. Then it begins to rise again, until the end of life where it fluctuates a bit. (https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/scientists-just-discovered-mid-life-crisis-peaks-at-age-47-heres-how-to-minimize-effect-of-happiness-curve.html)

This got my attention. I am in my 40s. The global happiness scale is lowest for those in this age range. WTF.

The whole point of the Harvard course is that you can manage your own happiness, hence the title Managing Happiness. Knowing that I can have agency is a useful first step.