Alone and Apparently a Great Lover
So this somehow got into my Facebook feed the other day: The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it's not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person--without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.” This was written by Osho, who is an Indian spiritualist. You can look up his name on the internet. At first glance, this seems very profound, but to me I didn’t like the exclusive and sometimes vagueness associated with it, so I decided to break it down and examine it, after all, isn’t that what we are supp...