It’s a question in a getting-to-know-you game: What is most important to you — love, knowledge, or self-expression?
Asked to respond in just that sort of scenario — isn’t it interesting the way we seek to “slot” people in simplistic fashion? — I found myself unwilling to answer immediately. Instead, I was hemming and hawing, and qualifying, qualifying, qualifying…
Could I remove my children from the equation? Love for them, doing right by them, being there for them — these trump everything.
Even with maternal devotion exempted, trying to choose among these “motivations” in life, I was stumped. Pressed to pick one and only one, I ultimately went with knowledge — perhaps a surprise? — though just by a nose. And in what might be a photo finish, love was right behind.
My rationale is as follows.
Let’s face it — learning, in all its forms, is less complicated than loving. And, in virtually any circumstance, you can pursue knowledge for your entire life, whereas love, romantic love that is, is far more elusive. You can be open to it, putting yourself out there to increase the likelihood that it finds you, and you can nurture it when you are living its charms and its challenges. But chasing it?
That, for me, has never worked.
Navigating love’s complexity? Tricky. Relying on love? Very tricky.
Feeling in control of it? No way. Though masterful manipulators may disagree.
And trusting it completely? Looking back on my own history, that isn’t a great idea…
Don’t get me wrong; I cherish the times I have fallen in love, stayed in love, given love, felt bathed in love. Nonetheless, I’ll stick with my selection. This, a matter of self-knowledge.
Assuming that most respondents in this parlor game choose love — and my understanding is that they do — I wonder if they do so because it is expected, or because they buy pretty platitudes like “love makes the world go round.” Maybe their life experience is dramatically different from my own. Maybe they too have been disappointed by their forays into commitment, but fundamentally believe in the necessity of romantic love all the same. Maybe they succumb to the seductions of being in love with love itself.
Maybe they don’t qualify as I did, interpreting the question to include the full spectrum of love’s colors, and not solely a romantic partner — love of children and parents, love of siblings and friends, love for humankind; love for nature, for animals, for our pets; love for our passions.
This last — the subject of passions — eases us into the third option, self-expression, which I don’t want to ignore. Like knowledge, isn’t the creative drive available to all of us throughout our lives? Don’t some of us live for the process of creating and participating in music, dance, film, theater, the visual arts, writing, fashion, design, and architecture?
Might your self-expression take wing in the digital arena? Captured in code?
Naturally, most of us would never be required to choose between love and self-expression or knowledge and love, though in the real world, we may defer one or the other — precisely because priorities dictate that we make difficult decisions. For example, completing a graduate program overseas at age 25 may be more important than a relationship “back home.” At 35, couldn’t that decision be different?
For that matter, doesn’t one sort of love take priority over another at times?
The pleasure of this sort of parlor game, for me, has always been the discussion that follows and what our reasoning reveals about who we are, where we are in our lives, and the experiences that have shaped us. And love — in all its glowing or god-awful incarnations — is certainly sure to figure heavily.
Add a glass of wine or two, and what could be more fascinating?
Do you play this sort of parlor game? If asked to select one of these three as most important in your life — love, knowledge, self-expression — which would you choose and why?
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