the basis of everything you have ever done is love...

In the last texts we have begun to examine the creation of emotion and the fact that its true basis is self-love. Here, in this text, we will go on a short journey together to delve more deeply into the basis of all human action and discover that this action is indeed love.

I know how difficult it is for most people to begin to see that the basis of everything they have ever done, even everything they have ever thought or believed, is love. So again, we will use a life story to gain a new perspective on human action and thought. Our story begins in America.

Mary was born in 1942, during the Second World War, to Catholic parents in a small town on Long Island, Rockville Center, some 25 miles from New York City. After February 17, 1950 Mary wished that she had been born in another time. February 17th was Mary’s birthday. On that day in 1950, on her eighth birthday, she waited in vain until late into the night for her father come home. He never came home. Ralph Moriarty died that night, along with 30 other people in the famous train crash of the Long Island Railway in Rockville Center. He was returning home from a long day in the office in Manhattan with a birthday present for his “special little girl.”

Mary’s life had not been easy until that time. She was a “war baby.” Her father was one of the survivors of the war…"for five short years," thought Mary with depressive sadness for many years after that February 17th. Mary’s mother had to work during the war years to support her tiny family. Sally Moriarty did what many women did in the Second World War: she "served" the war effort by working in the armaments industry. So, Sally got a job at Grumman Aircraft and worked on the assembly line producing planes for the Navy.

Mary saw her mother during the week—Sally had to leave in the early hours of the morning to get to work in Bethpage on time—and she returned after Mary fell asleep. In those years Mary’s grandmother took care of her most of the time. Until the end of the war, parents seemed to be fictitious figures from a surreal novel for Mary; she did not know her father and hardly knew her mother.

Mary’s grandmother, Anne, was from the “old school.” She came to the US as a small girl from Ireland at the end of the 19th century. Anne never forgot the abysmally crowded conditions on the ship to America. She also never forgot the near slavery she, her brothers and her parents lived in their early years as Irish immigrants in the U.S.

Anne transmitted her feelings of sad isolation and drudgery to her granddaughter growing up in a different time. At the base of the desperately sad isolation was a single thought: “Life is terribly hard and unfair.” That was Anne’s life experience both as a young child and as an adult. Irish Catholics did not have it easy in the America of the 1890’s. Anne and her husband were able to move out to Long Island in the 1920’s with young Sally and her two brothers. Anne’s husband had gotten a job in respectable Rockville Center with the railroad, and it was a good place for a Catholic to live, too. More than 50% of the population was Catholic there, and later, in 1957, Rockville Center even got its own bishop…

So Mary grew up with her grandmother’s attitude about life. This attitude was strongly bolstered by Mary’s life experience as a young girl. When her father died, one could fairly say that the fire went out of Mary’s life. After her father’s death, Mary came to the sad conclusion that she really did not have a right to be happy.

From 1950 onward, Mary’s grandmother’s attitude became the basis of her life: “Life is terribly hard and unfair.” Mary became an emotionally closed off young girl who never allowed anyone into her heart. Sally remarried in 1952. She married a Mr. Gallagher, who had a good profession. Mr. Gallagher enabled Mary and her mother to move up in the world. After attending Sacred Heart Academy in nearby Hempstead, a private Catholic school, Mary went to college, where she met her husband and had two children.

While Mary had developed a smiling exterior by the time she went to college, her inner attitude remained the same: “life is terribly hard and unfair.” Mary married the “right” kind of man. Ralph was also a good Catholic of Irish heritage. His family had “made it.” Ralph’s father had risen in business and Ralph also had good prospects.

Did Mary love Ralph? While she used the words, she had never given the question and serious thought. Ralph was simply from the right family and had excellent professional prospects. A young woman like Mary never considered anything else, until the marriage failed thirteen years later…

Now, what does Mary’s life story have to do with the essential question here: “the basis of everything you have ever done is love”?

Let us examine the basis of Mary’s life. Mary learned to survive, largely by internalizing her grandmother’s attitude, “life is terribly hard and unfair.” In her life experience in childhood Mary saw “proof” of this attitude: the war, her father’s early death and her working mother who was not there for her.

What does this have to do with love?

The most basic principle of Mary’s life was to survive. She learned to survive by closing herself off emotionally, by keeping her heart as closed off as possible from other people and from the events of her life. The basis of this practice is love, self-love.

Why? How?

Mary wanted to live. This was the only way Mary knew how to live. She loved herself so much that she tried to make the best life she possibly could for herself and later for the two children that she parented with her husband. Mary knew no other way to live. She only knew the basis of her grandmother’s life, “life is terribly hard and unfair,” and she passed this basis onto her children.

Is this basis wrong? Not from Mary’s perspective. It was the only way Mary knew how to survive, which meant to love herself. She had to pass this attitude onto her own children, because it was the only way she could imagine for them to live.

Mary will shortly be celebrating her 70th birthday. She is still alive, and she can still find love in this lifetime. In reality, it is so simple. All Mary would have to do is to realize how much she has loved herself to get this far. And then all she would have to do is to realize that while her grandmother’s attitude truly did serve her in her childhood, it no longer serves her as an adult. If she realizes that, she will give up the attitude and open her heart. That’s all it takes: to realize that a closed heart is not truly the path to love and to let go.

Now, let us move to your life. How have you been loving yourself in this lifetime? What have you been doing to survive, and what attitude or attitudes has/have propelled you through life so far?

If you allow yourself to change your perspective, you are going to begin to see that not only the attitudes you have had are, in reality, an expression of love. You are going to see that every single action you have ever taken and ever single thought you have had are all, in reality, acts and thoughts of love.

Let us return to Mary’s life for a moment in order to be able to see this. Mary not only took on her grandmother’s life attitude. She took on the conventions of her family, heritage and environment. Her parents were both “good” Catholics. And so, she became a “good” Catholic. Mary even went to a Catholic preparatory academy for girls, because “good” Catholic girls do that, if they want to get ahead in life. Mary married a “good” Catholic man from the “proper” background in order to form the “proper” basis of a “good” family. These are all, in the deepest sense, expressions of love to oneself.

Mary’s mother acted similarly. Sally went to work to earn money for her tiny family when her husband went to war. Yes, she sacrificed her relationship with her daughter, Mary, in order to do this. But, from Sally’s perspective this was an act of love in order to give her daughter the best possible basis for the future. Sally married Mr. Gallagher, not because she was in love with him, but because she wanted Mary to have the best possible basis for life. Sally could not have dreamt of affording to give Mary an education at the private high school that Sacred Heart Academy is. But, with Mr. Gallagher’s financial assistance this was not a problem.

Inside her heart, Mary always called her mother’s second husband “Mr. Gallagher,” because she had not desire to truly accept him as her stepfather. But, even this was an act of love from Mary’s perspective, because Mary wished to honor her own father in her heart.

In all probability, if you are honest with yourself, you are going to find that you have been using a very specific attitude to fuel your life in order to survive. If you are willing to dig deep enough inside yourself, you are going to find that this attitude is, at its very base, an expression of love.

If you keep on going as deep as you possibly can in your self-discovery process, you are going to find that there is nothing you have ever done this is not an expression of love at its very deepest base.

When you have realized that, you are going to have a great deal of difficulty not accepting the fact that your entire life up until this point has been, in reality, is an expression of love.

This will take some time, for the perspective is new and not generally accepted. In the meantime, I will be continuing to write new texts that will take us down the path together toward self-love.

Andrew Terker