Utku Kaynar
Four: The Virtue of Love
Photo by Heike Mintel on Unsplash.
January 16, 2018, Bursa / Türkiye
Ada,
As of today, you have been with us for exactly 3 months. You grow more adorable all the time, and you communicate with us with an ever greater understanding. Our love for you multiplies with every passing day. People used to say that you cannot understand the love of a child until you have one of your own. They were right.
Today we will talk about something that will hold a very important place in your life, something you will interpret with a different understanding as you grow older: love.
Like the way you see life or the things you are curious about, your choices about what you love will shape the course of your life. Whether we can choose the things we love, or whether, like other things, they emerge from a process in which our genes and biochemistry play a major role, we honestly do not know.
But as your father, I do know this: you will be happy to the extent that you can fill your life with the things you love in a lasting way. Remember how I spoke in earlier letters of living, loving, learning, and leaving a legacy? Love is the strongest of these four pillars of life.
Love is not an emotion unique to humans. On the contrary, you will more often see unconditional love, untouched by the ego, in animals. Still, a human being remains alive as long as they can love and hope.
To love is to feel closeness, appreciation, hope, passion, and warmth toward the object of your love—the beloved—without any thought intervening. It is the goodness, the lightness, almost the sunlight you feel inside when you look at the one you love or hear their voice. It is difficult to define. And because it is difficult, you will notice that for hundreds of years, the finest works of human literature, music, and art have tried to express this feeling and everything that happens around it. Love is not the same for everyone or everything we love. The love you feel for your mother or your friends, the love you feel for your pet or for nature, and the love you might one day feel for the person you share your life with are dramatically different feelings... Yet their components remain the same: closeness, passion, appreciation, and hope. Different combinations of these, in different proportions, give rise to different kinds of love within us.
Because the subject is so simple and at the same time so complicated, we cannot easily untangle it. Love is a feeling we experience every day, and one we can easily confuse with other things. To err is human. Sometimes forgetting that you love someone, or falling under the influence of other emotions and hurting the people you love, is also one of the side effects of being human.
Let me give you a shortcut for recognizing and distinguishing such a complex emotion: love is effort. You can measure your love for something by the effort you put into it. You will realize this when you look back later in life. You will be putting lasting, sustained effort into the things you love—truly love. Loving something or someone means making an effort for them, or for your relationship with them. This is what distinguishes real love from a passing fancy. In a passing fancy, there is little effort, or none at all.
Your ego will tell you that you need to possess the things you love. This is one of humanity's hardest tests, Ada. Real love has nothing to do with possessing or controlling. As Nazım Hikmet said, just because you love the apple does not mean the apple has to love you back. Real love is about uplifting, nurturing, and helping the beloved flourish, without trying to control or possess them.
Do you remember the numbers I gave you about the world and human history? In a journey lasting billions of years, humans live, at most—and even that is only a possibility—a hundred years. All the possessiveness, the urge to control, and the inability to share that they acquire in their lives spring from a feeling that is the exact opposite of love: fear. Fear of loss, fear of death, fear of being hurt. This, too, is part of being human. And yet, in this adventure so worth living, where we are guests for such a short time, being afraid to live, to love, and to share must be the most foolish—and indeed most human—thing we can do. In truth, we own nothing permanently; we share everything with the other beings in the universe. From possessions and property to flowers and nature.
Let me tell you a little about what we share: DNA is the building block of a human being, and carries a blueprint of each of us within us, from our eye color to our height.
Forty-six percent of human DNA is the same as a banana's. If you look closely enough, you will see that, in the mechanism for extracting sugar, 60% of our DNA is the same as a maple tree's. Despite the opponents of evolution who passionately defend their beliefs, 96% of our DNA is identical to a chimpanzee's. All the colors, nations, religions, sects, skin colors, narrow or round eyes you can see around you within human civilization... all share 99.9% of their DNA with one another.
Despite so much in common, a considerable portion of your fellow humans see themselves as privileged and superior by birth. Funny, isn't it?
All of us, including our Earth, are made of stardust, and we all have a life cycle. The most important way to make that life meaningful is to love and to make an effort for the things you love, my girl. No matter how much you expand your capacity to love, you will encounter surprising amounts of hatred, anger, and selfishness in your life. Not all members of our civilization develop at the same pace. When the time comes, we will also talk about how you should deal with these things.
Of course, you will love yourself, too. After all, this is your life, and you owe it first and foremost to yourself to live it well. You will love yourself with your mistakes and your good decisions. And you will put a great deal of effort into yourself, because it is only through effort that a person is shaped.
Let me end this letter with lines that a poet I love wrote to his daughter, just as I am doing now:
Think of every person as your friend, your sibling, my girl
A human being is born of joy, not hatred, my girl
Hold your dignity upright before oppression
Bow before love, my girl
With love,
Dad.