Love Gone (2020) Dessin par Edwin Loftus

This is a scene of melancholy, brought on by the disappearance of the relationship of love between participants. A female is used here, but it could just as well be a male. The environment is uncertain. The subject is alone. Her head and body arms are disconnected with her body and her legs are enmired, unable to take her to a better place.
We do not know what has taken romantic love out of this woman's life; a loss of attraction to her, death, a relocation, imprisonment ... there are many possible circumstances.
As we go through life, we generate an expandable and malleable, theory about what reality is. The removal of so important a part of that reality as romantic love rips a huge hole in that construct.
We can learn to accept the absence, reconstructing our reality to enable us to go on.
We can find a substitute for the love that we've lost and build a new reality around that new condition.
Or we can decide that we are too damaged, that a new construct is beyond our capacity, and withdraw from life, partially or completely.
The last of these is the potential that makes love so dangerous.
Tennyson wrote: "I hold it true, whate're befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all."
Life requires courage, no matter the conditions of that life. As in any question of courage, it also requires that we be as matured in the quest to create ourselves as possible, so that when courage is required, we have the strength of whatever kind, to meet Life's challenges with courage.
The person who has created a self and sense of self, (a 'sapience'), that has the elements to be whole and sustainable, is less likely to be left incapable of facing life when such a loss occurs. This is what the raising of children should be about, the provision of guidance that will allow the child to become their best, and most sustainable self.
Unfortunately, there is a cheat that most parents rely on, "learning through example."
Through this class of media, the child learns to use our simian ancestor's greatest strength, imitation. We learn situations and how others responded and hope that in some similar situation we can imitate the example's response and achieve similar results. These pre-formulated responses betray us. Each year they kill hundreds of thousands of us, in part because we are not those examples we are imitating. In part because similar circumstances are not identical circumstances.
Instead of learning about the world and its conditions, we learn scenarios and try to transfer those conditions to differing scenarios. Instead of basing our responses on our real circumstances and the real circumstances we encounter, we imitate someone else's responses to other circumstances. We play roles on a theatrical stage-version of life and expect it not to fail, because it worked in the drama we saw.
Reliance on such pre-formulated examples suppresses our urgency to develop adaptability in the confidence of knowing our true capacities. That leaves us less adaptable and more subject to untenable disruptions.
As an illustration; It is estimated by historians that the average Medieval, European male directly experienced warfare on an average of every twenty years, (2 to 3 times in a lifetime), and that fighting was within arm's reach and involving weapons meant to crush or cut open large parts of the body. The average family experienced the death of about one out of five of their children below age five and another one out of five from there to adulthood. It was common for men to have two wives, the first dying in childbirth, the second a backup to raise the children and keep the household. They experienced a plague on the average of once each twenty years. And they were subjected to innumerable other traumas. By today's standards, the vast majority of them should have been rendered psychologically unable to function about mid-life. But that was not the case. Some, no doubt were, but it was only in the last century that the problem became so common we developed an industry to address it.
I believe that we have become less able to deal with loss and trauma as we have become more able to learn by examples provided by communications media, and less reliant on first-hand experience.

Thèmes connexes

LossTraumaResponsesAdaptability