… our lives are woven together in love. … We belong to a mutually beneficial web of connection, well-being, and love. At the root of this connection is empathy; the result is kindness, compassion, respect, and understanding. … love is the strongest force on the planet. Jacqui Lewis, Fierce Love: A Bold Path to a Better Life and a Better World (New York: Harmony, 2021),
Pulled Taffy?
Does anyone feel like taffy these days, stretched so thin you are capable of snapping at any moment?
Wars, climate change, pandemics, maniacal leaders.
From deep within our caring hearts, we long to take on responsibility for solving every problem everywhere, all over the world.
The result is we become taffy people, our hearts and minds stretched so thin that we lose our elasticity, our resilience, our strength and our core. It leaves us frazzled, frenzied, and beleaguered, without a centre.
Our heads ache. Our hearts become numb. We feel powerless before the complexity and enormity of the problems.
We lose our desire and conviction to celebrate and to embrace life, to dance. Our feet and hands become paralyzed.
We abandon our calling, our responsibility, our gift to this world, which is …
… to love.
Our Gift
But isn’t our care, concern, even preoccupation with these global issues an expression of our love?
Perhaps, perhaps not.
At best, it is love spread so thin that it is ineffectual. Like taffy, it is left with the consistency of cellophane.
More likely, it is a blend of fear, prejudice, guilt, a need to control and a host of other projections which masquerade as caring but actually inhibit or prohibit the expression of love. In the counsel of Carl Jung, love can not co-exist with duty and guilt.
Loving from our heart’s core is not primarily about solving problems or even alleviating suffering but binding ourselves together with another in shared humanity and vulnerability.
Jesus lived in times at least as bleak as our own. His response to the social and political woes of the day was the parable of the Good Samaritan. Love is as love does. A neighbour is as a neighbour needs.
Deep Love
Love at its most powerful is a mutual exchange of two people relating in caring attention. We need to inhabit love with the fullness of our being.
Love, at its deepest and richest, is up close and personal. Love is strongest when we can reach out and touch the object of our love.
Deep love needs to be individual, particular. Love needs texture, smell, sound, touch.
Deep love extends no further than your hand.
Love needs a face. Love is particular and individual.
We love best, one person at a time.
We do not love in the abstract, distant and detached. We love the particular, the up close and personal.
Is Tango “the Dance of Love”?
Tango is often termed “three minutes of love.” Is there any truth to that?
Perhaps, perhaps not. Like everything else we engage in or think about, there is the possibility of some truth and the likelihood of much falsehood.
It is certainly up close.
Tango presents many of the prerequisite conditions for caring affection: reaching out and touching someone, holding another in a warm, comforting, supportive embrace, listening to another with gentleness, attentiveness, and atunement.
But is it personal?
I have heard repeatedly (indeed recently) that Tango is not personal. Instead, we are in love with the music and the form of our dance, not our partner. In other words, we can engage at such an intimate level without it being intimate.
What are the missing elements that can translate our Tango experience into true affection?
Personally, I have found over time that I have developed a deep affection for my dance partners, though we have nothing in common and no other shared experience than our dances. But this is because, in consort with learning the technique of dancing, I have practiced the refined art of opening my heart and mind to my partner with non-judgement, receptivity, humility, vulnerability and surrender. In other words, a choice of intention.
And if I do not choose this experience in Tango, what are the chances that I will find it in this complex and perplexing world?
ADV 25/05/2026