Yesterday, I washed my bicycle. This was my first time washing my bicycle because I didn’t think of bicycles as something to wash. However, after my move, I suddenly wanted to do so.
Today, I will introduce one of my mental changes after living in the countryside.
How to increase feelings of love
Sometimes, we want to be surrounded by what we love. This may also mean we want to increase something we love. It includes not only humans but also favorite activities or beloved tools.
A life with feeling love would be one of mental abundance. That is why we want to be surrounded by what we love.
However, we sometimes cannot have it because we don’t know how to make it happen.
Today, I will introduce a way to increase our love. Changing the environment and being in a more inconvenient place can help. This knowledge might give us more love and mental abundance.
The nature of love
The shape of love could change based on the environment. In other words, changing the environment could change what we feel love for.
To explain it, let me introduce two types of love. Although there could be various shapes of love, I often feel love like below:
- Attachment love is feeling love for useful things. The more it is loyal to us and we can use them to improve our lives, the more love we feel.
- Empathic love is feeling love for weak people with potential. The more we see such an unfortunate person, the more we feel love and want to help.
In other words, we feel love for useful things. This is simple and natural. We usually don’t feel love for the enemy who tries to hurt our loved things.
How love affects us
This is why children want to receive love from parents or society. That love reassures the children that they can be there. If they don’t have it, they often try to contribute to parents or society to receive love, even if they bend their nature. That causes an inferiority complex.
This tells us changing the environment could change the shape of our love. This is because what is useful could change.
It also means that being in a more inconvenient place increases our love because we have to rely on more useful items.
An example of how I felt more love
In the case of my bicycle, that was attachment love.
I used the bicycle even before this move. Although I always used it, I didn’t have an attachment to wash it clean. Perhaps this is because I lived in a place where I could live even without it. There were stores in the neighborhood that I could walk to. It was a convenient place.
However, after I moved here, my bicycle became important for my life. There are no grocery shops in the neighborhood. I had to rely on my bicycle.
That increased my love for the bicycle. It is loyal to me. I can control it and manage it at my will. I can improve my life with it. That increased my love of attachment to it and made me want to wash it clean.
Now I am more attached to my bicycle than I have ever been. This feeling warms my heart.
Frugality is a shape of love
By the way, empathic love also gives us a feeling of love. Being frugal is one of them.
Frugality is an activity in which we prioritize useful and inexpensive things. The mental logic is the same as helping weak people. We help things that have potential but are not appreciated by many people.
That would be why we feel mental abundance when we choose frugality intentionally. It is a kind of love.
On the other hand, if we try to be luxurious, we often feel a lack of love. Although those luxurious things excite us, we sometimes feel like our hearts are not fully fulfilled. Somewhere in our hearts, we know it is just a waste. We cannot immerse ourselves in luxurious pleasure, no matter how we try to.
Perhaps our empathy causes this. We may want to prioritize helping others rather than wasting resources for short-term excitement.
We can also increase this empathic love by changing our environment. The environment that requires more frugality would increase our gratitude. Gratitude is one shape of love. Our environment changes what we feel love for.
Conclusion
That is a way to increase our love.
Changing the environment and being in a more inconvenient place can increase our love.
This knowledge might give us more love and mental abundance.
Thank you for reading this article. I hope to see you in the next one.
