10:30pm July 17, 2014

Another thing I got out of reading tons and tons of book reviews.

Is that apparently people believe that wisdom has to be complicated and intellectually stimulating in a certain way.

Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s precious little wisdom in the book that was being reviewed.

But I was struck by the way the reviewers chose to describe it.

They talked about how it’s cliche that love is the most important thing in the world.

Apparently if a thing is cliche, it can’t be true.

But it is true.  Love is the most important thing in the world.

And it’s simple, and not intellectually complicated.  I guess you could make it intellectually complicated if you wanted to, and sometimes that’s not a bad thing, but sometimes it is a bad thing.  Sometimes simplicity is best.

They were also bothered about the cliche of death bringing wisdom.

But my experiences, and the experiences of many people I know who have faced death, say otherwise.  Facing your own mortality – truly facing it, not running from it – forces you to look at the deeper questions in life.  It forces you to figure out what is really important.

I noticed this with years of adrenal crises and aspirations and pneumonia, getting worse, knowing I was going to die.  It did force me to look at those things.

And as my father is dying of cancer, I watch him grapple with the same questions.  And I watch as the deepest love begins to pour through him into the world around him and touch everything.

This is not the only way death can go.

But it is one way death can go, if you open yourself up to that experience.

It doesn’t matter how cliched it is that impending death can bring wisdom.

It doesn’t matter how cliched it is that love, and exercising that love, is the most important thing in the entire world.

Those things are true.

I know, I know, the book bastardized those things and turned them into sentimental glurge crap.

But the reviewers too often seemed eager to knock the whole idea that love is important.  "Everyone knows that.“ "There’s nothing intellectually challenging about that.” “Why does it take facing death to notice that?”

In answer to those people, I imagine the person doesn’t understand the depth to which people are talking about, when they say ‘love’ in this context.  Because that depth of love is something it takes a lifetime to grapple with and to succeed to any degree.

So the book was wrong.

But so were a lot of the reviewers.

Death can bring intense insights into the world and how we should live.  It peels away our defenses against reality and leaves us – if we don’t fight it – facing important parts of reality that humans normally wall ourselves off from.  Including the ultimate love.

And that ultimate love is the most important thing out there, hands down, nothing compares.

It does not matter if those are cliches.  It does not matter if they are not intellectually challenging.  They are still real, as real as real can get.

And that is why I am always posting about love being the most important thing.  That is why love is what my father and I talk about when we Skype, both verbally and nonverbally.  Love is important and we forget that at our peril.  Mock it, consider it too simplistic, at your peril, as well.

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