« [T]he definition of love [implies] effort. When we extent ourselves, when we take an extra step or walk an extra mile, we do so in opposition to the inertia of laziness or the resistance of fear. Extension of ourselves or moving out against the inertia of laziness we call work. Moving out in the face of fear we call courage. Love, then, is a form of work or a form of courage. Specifically, it is the work or courage directed toward the nurture of our own or another’s spiritual growth.
[…] The principal form that the work of love takes is attention. When we love another we give him or her our attention; we attend to that person’s growth. When we love ourselves we attend to our own growth. […] The act of attending requires that we make the effort to set aside our existing preoccupations and actively shift our consciousness. Attention is an act of will, of work against the inertia of our own minds. […] True listening, total concentration on the other, is always a manifestation of love.
An essential part of true listening is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one’s own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker’s world from the inside, stepping inside his or her shoes. This unification of speaker and listener is actually an extension and enlargement of ourself, and new knowledge is always gained from this. Moreover, since true listening involves bracketing, a setting aside of the self, it also temporarily involves a total acceptance of the other.
[…] The energy required for the discipline of bracketing and the focusing of total attention is so great that it can be accomplished only by love, by the will to extend oneself for mutual growth. Most of the time we lack this energy. […] Couples [in counseling] are often surprised, even horrified, when we suggest to them that among the things they should do is talk to each other by appointment. It seems rigid and unromantic and unspontaneous to them. Yet true listening can occur only when time is set aside for it and conditions are supportive of it. It cannot occur when people are driving, or cooking or tired and anxious to sleep or easily interrupted or in a hurry. Romantic “love” is effortless, and couples are frequently reluctant to shoulder the effort and discipline of true love and listening. But when and if they finally do, the results are superbly gratifying.
[…] The act of love—extending oneself—as I have said, requires a moving out against the inertia of laziness (work) or the resistance engendered by fear (courage). Let us turn now from the work of love to the courage of love. When we extend ourselves, our self enters new and unfamiliar territory, so to speak. Our self becomes a new and different self. We do things we are not accustomed to do. We change. The experience of change, of unaccustomed activity, of being on unfamiliar ground, of doing things differently is frightening.
[…] On some level spiritual growth, and therefore love, always requires courage and involves risk. […] If you move out to another human being, there is always the risk that that person will move away from you, leaving you more painfully alone than you were before.
[…] The final and possibly the greatest risk of love is the risk of exercising power with humility. The most common example of this is the act of loving confrontation. Whenever we confront someone we are in essence saying to that person, “You are wrong; I am right.” […] For the truly loving person the act of criticism or confrontation does not come easily; to such a person it is evident that the act has great potential for arrogance. To confront one’s beloved is to assume a position of moral or intellectual superiority over the loved one, at least so far as the issue at hand is concerned. […] To confront someone with something he or she cannot handle will at best be a waste of time, and likely will have a deleterious effect. […] The dilemma can be resolved only by painstaking self-scrutiny, in which the lover examines stringently the worth of his or her “wisdom” and the motives behind this need to [confront]. […]
There are, then, two ways to confront or criticize another human being: with instinctive and spontaneous certainty that one is right, or with a belief that one is probably right arrived at through scrupulous self-doubting and self-examination. […] There are a significant number of indiviuals who for one reason or another have learned to inhibit their instinctive tendency to criticize or confront with spontaneous arrogance but go no farther, hiding in the moral safety of meekness […]. To fail to confront when confrontation is required for the nurture of spiritual growth represents a failure to love equally as does thoughtless criticism or condemnation and other forms of active deprivation of caring. »
— M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
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