(Auto-generated)Welcome back, you wonderful people who matter so very, very, very much!
And thanks for coming back once again for another sampling of my tea.
And here's to hoping that you yourself decide that it's some pretty good tea and serve it
to others.
For those of you who have been patiently waiting, in this chapter we solve one of the riddles
I proposed at the start in a very crucial way.
See, now we've already got our background on people affecting us in unpredictable ways,
and the granddaddy fear, the fear of the unknown.
We know that the interconnection between people is deeper than we can see.
And we're going to continue with the assumption that everything was not only made by God,
but made out of God, and that it's been made pretty clear that the most important thing
of all is to love one another, slash God.
And notice that that commandment, by the way, was not worship, or believe in, or to respect,
or obey, but to love.
It is love itself that will help us find the answer to the riddle of the missing sound.
And the seconders know this may be a short one, but it's a lovely one.
So let's get right into it.
Chapter 5.
Genuine Lo and behold, I've just handed you the keys
to as much genuine happiness as you care to convert your time, your energy, or your attention
into.
So why the hesitation?
What is it that keeps us from doing this?
Well, trust, to be blunt.
We don't trust each other.
At least not in a, I've never met you before and my defenses are down kind of way.
After all, what's to keep people that you do kindness for from taking advantage of your
generosity?
Go ahead, think of a few arguments against living like that.
Go on, I'll wait.
Now I'd be willing to wager that most of the reasons, if not all of them that you manufactured,
were provided to you by the big grand daddy of all fear.
What if they take advantage?
What if I end up needing what I gave?
What if, what if, what if?
It's this type of thinking which leads to such ephemeral happiness and short term love.
Most of the time when we love, we tend to do it with the fair amount of our defenses
still up.
We tend to love with aim.
We choose to love certain people once we believe we can trust them.
We fire our love out at certain people from the arrow slits in our defense walls.
And quite a lot of us are very decisive about who's allowed to breach the gates of our
castle walls and how far in they're allowed to breach.
But that is not the only way that we love.
You've loved without aim before, I hope.
And it felt amazing.
When people say and they genuinely mean, we had the best time tonight, I would bet there
was a fair amount of loving without aim that occurred.
You see, sometimes we become overwhelmed with joy.
When this happens, our defenses tend to go down.
Genuine un-aimed love tends to drop these defenses automatically.
There are countless things that can trigger this.
Imagine that you're climbing a hill on a roller coaster that you're excited to ride, or sledding
down a particularly good hill in the snow, or you're madly in love and you're enjoying
a stroll on a conversation with that person, or you're headed dinner with a bunch of family
members that you love dearly, or friends that you haven't seen in far too long.
In those moments, we're happy.
Our defenses start coming down, and then seemingly out of nowhere, we start loving without aim.
We aren't worried about who will take advantage of this vulnerability, nor that trusting will
lead us off the path that we've chosen for ourselves.
We just love.
Just before the roller coaster tips forward, we smile.
As our feet punch through the snow and we mentally position our body in the sled, while
the lip of the hill is fast approaching, that smile widens into a grin.
And as that person you're madly in love with does something on your walk that you just
find indescribably adorable, where you look around the table at all the loved ones that
you've missed, and that grin boils over, and you laugh the genuine laugh.
And how fitting that it should easily be the most pleasant, infectious, musical, and joyful
sound we make.
Now earlier, I gave you the riddle of the missing sound.
What is the nonverbal sound of love?
And now I've provided the answer.
It's the genuine laugh.
It's a riddle by its very structure.
The answer is always possible in a riddle.
It's the question that makes it seem impossible.
In this particular case, when I asked you what the sound of love was, you made the assumption
that we were referring to the type of love we tend to have the most experience with.
Love with A. And that's a big part of why the answer was not readily apparent.
And if you're about to argue that you laugh the genuine laugh while loving with A, I would
ask you to think back honestly and see if in those moments you didn't drop your defenses
a bit.
See if you didn't love a bit more openly in those moments.
And that's it for me today.
I know it was a short one, but thank you for coming to my reading.
You can check out the YouTube channel at youtube.com slash could help.
You can contact the podcast at will help mail at gmail.com.
Come talk about this stuff, ask questions or hear what others think at r slash the laughing
matters on Reddit.
And you can stay up to date with the show's Facebook page at facebook.com slash I could
help.
Until next episode, try dropping your defenses a little more out there and laugh the genuine
laugh a bit more.
I bet you that you'll find there's a lot of love out there that's just gone unclaimed.
There's so many of them out there fanning away at that ember, just trying to keep it
from going out, feed their fires, encourage them to act out of love by acting out of love.
Be the start of the chain reaction and the cacophony.
The more you do, the more you shape the narrative of this world.
So get out there, set off some fireworks, be good for them and be good to them and you're
gonna be great.
Be sweet.
Bye everybody.