Last week at work, at the end of service, a group of us were standing around polishing glasses and singing songs that use the name of a person within the lyrics. Who knows how it started, but that’s the kind of mindless thing that seems to happen at one o’clock in the morning after a particularly long night running around in a restaurant. Well, that and the consumption of numerous drinks….
Anyway, someone asked me if anyone had ever written a song that had my name in it. Little did they know!
My name means love and the radio is filled with songs of love found, love lost and everything in between.
As I walked home that evening I got to thinking about love and the ways in which we express it to the people in our lives. Why do we feel more loved by some people than others? Why is it hard to express our feeling of love, of affection and care, to some people and not to others? Why does it sometimes feel impossible to say the words “I love you” to one person and not another?
Gary Chapman wrote a book years ago called the 5 Love Languages. I remember being an early teenager when I first read it and not really understanding it beyond the context of my parents and the way in which they expressed love for me. My Mum gave words of affirmation and my Dad performed acts of service, perhaps why it was always more obvious to me that Mum loved me – we speak the same language. Words actually speak louder than actions to me. If we acknowledge that people communicate love, and feel loved, in different ways I think we get better communication within our relationships.
Love isn’t all about romance, flowers and sappy George Cloony films. It’s about tenderness, compassion and feelings of connectedness with other human beings. Love is the stuff inside you that feels good, the opposite of fear and all that is positive in this world wrapped up in to a single concept that can be expressed in the English language with just four letters.
Or, if you speak Balinese, just six little letters that spell out the word Tresna.
