Caring means loving!

To care means we connect and love

Agape is the ancient Greek word for one of the three forms of love (eros and philia being the other two).  My favourite cognitive scientist, John Vervaeke, calls agape “the love that forms a person” and it is this love that helps form a baby into a healthy human able to fully take their place in the world.

I would also add, importantly, that providing this love to the child also forms the person who is giving it, the adult becomes healthier and more integrated as they express agape.

It is a simple step to further claim that offering this form of love to the ‘other’ would have a similar dual effect, forming both into healthier humans.

It is here that we run into a roadblock.

Our connection with many ‘others’ who surround us is obscured with a thicket of ‘triggers’ and fixed beliefs that prevent us from offering agape to everyone we meet.

Mary Cassatt - Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child - detail

Last week I talked about the need to develop ourselves, with one dimension being the development of caring.  This is what I meant.  It is only through extinguishing our triggers and re-framing fixed beliefs that we can connect sufficiently to provide agape to those around us.

Are we doing this selfishly for our own benefit, or are we doing this altruistically for their benefit?

It does not really matter, either way, the benefits available accrue to all parties.

It is relatively easy to offer agape to babies, especially for their parents, it is not so hard with small children, but it gets increasingly more difficult with older children and most especially with adults.

It is practicing agape with adults that will give us most benefit.  I do not think it is an overstatement to say that this is probably one of the biggest challenges facing the world today.

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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