Of late I have begun to understood the wisdom behind the words of Etsko Schuitema when he says:
Unconditional service does not require love, it produces love.
Here’s my story of how this helped me in my journey:
Some 6 years ago, my exceptionally robust Mom was diagnosed with a brain tumour. After a serious neurosurgery, she went onto a ventilator for a few days and then slowly started recovering. When I flew down to Karachi to meet her, I was shocked. She was partially paralysed and on the bed, she couldn’t speak clearly and she could not blink one of her eyes. However, she was overjoyed to see me. I could see her eyes light up and her mouth twist into a half smile when I hugged her.
As time passed by, her condition became worse. So much so that she became a living corpse. The next time that I came from Lahore to be with her, I was clueless about what to do for her. I was in too much of an enormous emotional pain to be able to serve her as was needed.
On the contrary, my father, brother and sister were doing things for her that required lots and lots of courage, love and strength. My sister was expecting and doing a very hectic job at the same time. Every morning, before getting her kids ready for school, she would drive over, change the dressings of my Mom’s wounds, exercise her paralysed limbs, feed her the daily morning dose of medicines, brush her teeth and talk to her before she would hurry off to work.
From there, my father would take up the 2 hourly tube feeding and turning her over so she would not have more bed sores. By night, when my father would retire to bed exhausted, my brother would come back from work and wash up mom like a baby…even if it was as late as 3 a.m. Together, between themselves, my siblings would cut her nails, feed her fruit puree through a tube that went directly into her stomach, talk to her, walk her around in a wheel chair and go all out to make her comfortable. Some months later, she stopped responding at all.
During this time, I would wince and cry just at the sight of her bed sores. I felt a mental block in trying to do something for her. It was not that I did not love her. I felt as though I lacked the strength to contribute. I also felt that my brother and sister loved my mother far more than I did. This had not been the case prior to her illness. They had been the regular offspring who quarreled with Mom off and on and disagreed with her and took her motherly overtures of love for granted usually. And now, they were coming up with things to make her life better… things that I could not have even thought of in a dozen years. An air filled mattress to minimise bed sores, mouthwash gargles to prevent tooth decay and so much more. Somehow, both of them had undergone a huge transformation. What had brought this transformation was beyond me.
If it was Mom’s illness, then I should have experienced the same turnaround in my capacity to love and be strong. And also, not everyone rises to a parent’s adversity like they did. I felt like my capacity to love was little.
So clueless I started praying for an increase in love. I wanted my heart to love more, to have the strength to love and show this love to the people in my life.
Six years on, and almost four years since my Mom died, the answers are now beginning to pour in as my aged father has moved in with me for a few months. I feel privileged at what life has sent my way in terms of serving an aged parent; particularly one with whom I had an awkward, uneasy relationship. In serving him, I am being able to fill the pieces of the jigsaw that helps me to see my own reflection better.
Indeed the capacity to love increases if you serve someone unconditionally; even if the recipient is someone you resent initially. In the case of my siblings, the transformation of love and courage took place for them because they chose to look after Mom as best as they could. They chose to respond to the situation unconditionally. They chose to serve her day in and day out and refused to send her to a health facility. In acting appropriately to what life required of them, they increased in love, courage, emotional fortitude, generosity and maturity.
Etsko Schuitema teaches, that love is the inward quality and service is one’s outward i.e. manifest quality. The two qualities help to increase each other. So if one serves another unconditionally i.e. without expecting any rewards, the act produces love. Also, this love enables one to gauge the recipient’s needs better and serve him or her even better. Applying this to Schuitema’s Transactional Correctness Model, love is akin to gratitude since we feel love towards those we are grateful to (for making us feel good, fulfilled, happy or loved) and service is akin to generosity. Therefore, gratitude enables generosity and generosity enables gratitude.
A woman goes through a similar ‘increase in the capacity to love’ on becoming a mother. She forgoes her own needs to serve her infant day in and day out with little expectation of what the infant will give back to her on attaining adulthood, if at all.
It is easy to ‘increase your love for your children or parents’ by serving them. But the challenge lies in doing the same for lets say thorny relationships or professional (and thorny!) relationships.
I think the equation works just as good for anybody provided you are willing to do the following while serving them unconditionally with what is in their best interest:
- Look at all the things you could be grateful about in having these people in your life.
- Appreciate the goodness they have brought in your life, even if it is small.
- Affirm more than you negate.
- Be firm about your limits and state your limits clearly.
- Dissociate with your hurt and see the person’s suffering by stilling your own mind. The one who hurts is incapacitated. Once you diagnose the incapacity, you will not take your hurt personally.
I am also convinced like the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz said once to the effect that of all the ways, the way of love is supreme and without fault… it’s the only way that works.
What do you think?