To Love or to Be Loved

To Love or to Be Loved

“To be, or not to be? That is the question” is just one of the many oft quoted lines of William Shakespeare. While I believe that Shakespeare was one of the greatest wordsmiths of all time, I think he missed the mark a little bit on this particular point.  “The question” really ought to be: to love, or to be loved?

To love, or to be loved? That is the question.  While I do not pretend to be a Shakespeare expert (in fact, I must admit that I have never actually seen Hamlet [which is what the famous “To be, or not to be?” comes from] – which is a shame), as I understand it, he is talking about living or dying, and the injustice that is life.  And yet, had he asked a different question, “To love, or to be loved?” he would have found the answer to the question that he did in fact ask.  For had he asked the question, “To love, or to be loved?” he would have found the secret to happiness and the cure for the injustice of life.

The world would have us think that being loved is far more important than loving.  I would guess that there would be some that would go so far as to say that the only reason to love is to be loved.  Many good people believe that being loved is what brings happiness in our lives.  And they are indeed correct, at least to some extent.  Being loved brings some degree of happiness into our lives.  When we are feeling down, a frequent cause is that we feel like no one cares about us.  We probably even know that there are people that care about us. Yet somehow, even though we know that, we don’t feel it; we still feel like no one cares about us, or we feel that we are alone, or that no one knows how we feel.  Usually such feelings are entirely irrational, but that doesn’t change the way that we feel.

But if we change our outlook and start looking to love rather than being loved, then we would find that no matter what happens, we can still have a joyful life. That doesn’t mean that we don’t experience pain or that our life all of the sudden becomes perfect, but it does become filled with joy, in spite of all the bad things.

Many times we feel depressed because we have answered the question the wrong way: we are looking to be loved rather than to love.  And in fact, by answering the question that way, we can mistakenly then ask Hamlet’s famous question: “to be, or not to be?” instead of the question that we ought to ask, “to love, or to be loved?”

To love.