Love One Another
“He said”, “she said”, “If only they would have done…”, “I heard…”, and on and on it goes. It’s called gossip, rumor, innuendo, half-truths, and none of it serves anyone other than our own selfish need to be right and liked. Dale Carnegie, who wrote the “Bible” of human relationships and communication entitled, “How To Win Friends and Influence People”, summed it up best when he said, “If most people treated others like they do their dogs, there wouldn’t be a need for this book.”
In 1943, Abraham Maslow submitted a paper, which is now infamously known as “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs”. It is a theory in psychology that he proposed in his 1943 paper, ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, which he subsequently extended. His theory contends that as humans meet ‘basic needs’, they seek to satisfy successively ‘higher needs’ that occupy a set hierarchy. Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people, writing, “The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and cripple philosophy.” (Motivation and Personality, 1987)
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels: The four lower levels are grouped together as deficiency needs associated with physiological needs, while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs. While or deficiency needs must be met, our being needs are continually shaping or behavior. The basic concept is that the higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus once all the needs that are lower down in the pyramid are mainly or entirely satisfied. Growth forces create upward movement in the hierarchy, whereas regressive forces push prepotent needs further down the hierarchy. The five levels of needs are:
Actualization
Esteem
Love Belonging
Safety
Physiological
After the physiological and safety needs are met, humans need to be loved and feel like they belong. Since we are all humans, who doesn’t need, want and desire this? Like my mother always used to say, “Brett, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Well the best definition of love I’ve personally every seen is as follows:
LOVE – Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its on way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong doing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things. There are these three things: Faith, Hope and Love. The greatest of these is LOVE.
I don’t know about you but sounds like a pretty awesome way of being! We all need it and we all want it. As Nike would say, Let’s just do it…Love one another!
Believe…