While I was giving that little concert recently, a neighborhood girl about seven or eight years old came to watch and listen with that look of wide-eyed fascination which you see only in children. It struck me that this might have been the first time she had ever witnessed someone making live music, so I gave her a big wink. ;-)
I like the fact that we talk of giving a concert and making music. Music is indeed a gift, as are all the arts. Certain people are drawn to these forms of making and giving, seemingly out of a superabundance of aliveness, creative energy, or imagination. Here again I perceive similarities to the freehearted giving of love in all its forms: parenting, romance, friendship, neighborliness, brotherhood, etc.
José Ortega y Gasset touches on these matters in his book On Love, although he couches them in an old-fashioned (to my mind) psychology of the sexes. Consider the following two quotes:
A man feels love primarily as a violent desire to be loved, whereas for a woman the primary experience is to feel love itself, the warm flow which radiates from her being toward her beloved and the impulse toward him. The need to be loved is felt by her only consequently and secondarily.
And:
Every woman appears to be a little saint, if we think that saintliness consists in sliding over life without letting oneself be compromised by it. And, yet, the truth is exactly the opposite: that almost unreal figure is merely awaiting the opportunity to throw herself - with such impetus, decisiveness, courage, and unconcern for painful consequences - into an impassioned whirlwind, that she outdoes the most resolute man, who sheepishly discovers himself to be of a practical, calculating, and vacillating temperament.
The traits that Ortega uncovers here are, I think, more widely distributed than he lets on: they are not a matter of sexuality but of personality. I, for one, seem to be the kind of passionately giving person he describes. In my youth I worked hard to hide these aspects of myself because certain early experiences made me well acquainted with some of the painful consequences Ortega alludes to. Furthermore, I agree with Ortega that there's a certain sort of courage and fearlessness wrapped up with throwing oneself into the impassioned whirlwind of personal relationships and creative activities. It's not for everyone, and it wasn't for me either until I slowly came to see that this is what life is all about.
I'll let Ortega have the last word: "Let others think what they like: for me, the culmination of life consists of a pure and subtly dramatic passion."
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION