Health vs Resiliency

There is a not uncommon practice among my peers, which is to justify behavior in the name of mental health. I firmly believe that mental health is something that’s very important, and that ignoring it can lead to massively detrimental consequences. I think that mental health is an integral part of personhood, whatever that sentence actually means. I also want to clarify that my use of “mental health” in this essay does not refer to mental health in a psychiatric sense. Clearly, that is a realm of extremity in this subject matter that I, a non-professional, am not ready to make statements on. I mean to use “mental health” in its common or garden sense. I am not, however, saying that there is a clear distinction between the two, or anything that demarks them. I shall simply deal with generalities. What I find a little baffling and unsettling is that people often use the excuse of mental health simply as that- an excuse. It seems that some individuals, when faced with a challenging situation that they find personally uncomfortable or difficult to navigate, will find the easiest way out and say that it’s for reasons having to do with mental health. I take issue with this. I think that mental health is something that one ought to consider when they are facing situations that may cause them mental distress. But my perception of these people in their aforementioned situations don’t seem to be doing that. They seem to be resigned to the belief that any amount of mental distress past a certain threshold is bad for them, and therefore is to be avoided. They are unwilling to let themselves be challenged in meaningful, growth encouraging ways, and I honestly think that they are suffering for it.

One theme that I think represents my argument rather well is that of health vs resiliency. Let’s consider an analogy. Imagine a person sitting at home, considering going on a jog. Before them are three choices. First, they could not go for a run. Second they could go for a jog, but at a pace where they won’t really get out of breath, and their muscles won’t be sore the next day. Third, they could go for a jog and really push themselves. They’d soak their shirt in sweat and their legs would protest when they got out of bed the next day. I think that it’s obvious that the person wouldn’t get any stronger if they took the first option. I think it’s also obvious that the person would get stronger if they took the second option, but not as strong as if they took the third. A person who consistently takes the second option would be left in the dust over time progress-wise compared to someone who consistently takes the third. Does this mean that the third option is better than the second one? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps they’re running for different reasons that are undefined in the parameters of this hypothetical. I will, however, posit that the third option is better than the second at improving the strength and health of our imaginary person. Sure, we recognize that the person is going to have to leave his or her comfort zone. They’re going to have to challenge himself or herself in ways that he or she may find to be uncomfortable, or even distressful, but when presented in this context, I think that it’s not to challenging to see that simply because something is uncomfortable or causes distress does not make it an ultimately compelling reason not to do it. Yes, there will be times when this person is feeling sore, or tired, or weaker. There will be times when they maybe get shin splints or an ingrown toenail. They’ll probably even face an injury every now and then. There is also a scenario where this person pushes himself or herself too hard, and ends up having to stop for a while and recover. These are all adverse setbacks that would seem to indicate retrograde progress, but we know that this is not truly the case.

When people say they’re doing something for their mental health, the question that pops into my mind is “what about their mental resiliency?” What about challenging themselves so they can learn to get up again and bounce back? What about pushing themselves to the boundaries of exhaustion so they can recharge and be even stronger than before? I think that when it comes to mental distress, many people are not choosing between the danger of overtraining or injury and training at an appropriate and productive pace, to revive the jogger analogy. They are choosing between option two and three, or option one and three. They see the potential distress that seems looming and imminent should they endeavor to push themselves, and they see the dangers of risking injury, and the discomfort of the ingrown toenails and sweat drenched chafing, and they find themselves overwhelmed. So they shut down and sit down on the couch. And like the jogger, I think that in the name of health, they forsake it.

On Doing Good Band

So in case any of you on this blog are thus far unaware, I am a trumpet player. I started in 3rd grade, I remember the first beginner Walmart trumpet my parents got me, and taking lessons, and being a very poor player for a very long time. I think it is only through the instance of my parents that I stuck with it through elementary, middle school, and high school, and now I play for the marching band and Jazz ensemble at my college. I was recently having a conversation with my marching band director who is a very dear friend of mine, and he was berating the jazz band trumpet section for not performing musically. At first I was mystified as to the meaning of this criticism. Not that I’m not adept at handling criticism. Anyone who has ever learned music from a teacher knows that criticism is at least 90% of every rehearsal, and that’s how people get better- correcting and improving. But he went on to say that the music isn’t notes and rhythms. This statement is a little counterintuitive. If you pick up a sheet of music, what it contains is primarily notes and rhythms. When you’re learning music, what you sit down and focus on is learning the notes and rhythms. At least I do anyway. Instead, what he said that what makes music musical is details. I’m familiar with his teaching style, and I knew that by the term “details” he refers to thing such as the emphasis of certain notes and the deemphasis of others, the clean releases, the uniform attacks, and the nuances of balance and voicing. It seems to me that surely this is an instance of missing the forest for the trees. It’s all well and good if these are the things that experienced individuals and ensembles focus on because there is a tacit expectation that notes and rhythms are already prepared and mastered, but as we conversed, it became evident to me that to him, these things are of utmost importance. If you don’t play half the notes, so long as the notes that you play have the correct weight and emphasis in the lyricism of the material, then that is far better than playing every single note and rhythm correctly but flubbing the details. In fact, in our marching band, he encourages less experienced or competent players to do exactly that. Sousa’s marches are reduced to a series of downbeats. Slurs are supplemented for half the section because their legato tongue is too percussive. This is always something that I struggled to agree with, in my 3 years of playing with the ensemble. As a relatively experienced player, It seemed to me that what one ought to learn first would be notes and rhythms, and all that detail stuff is the makeup on the cake, the superstructure that elevates a solid performance to another level. To him, this is false. It is not only false, it is borderline blasphemy.

Whether or not this is true is not the subject of discussion here. I think that this too is a subject of contention and controversy and represents a bridge I’ll burn when I get to it. What really had me thinking is far more concrete than abstract, and far more selfish than grandiose. Because when I show up to rehearsal, I know that what I focus on is still very much notes and rhythms. When I take a rep, my first priority is “don’t flake up” (without the word “flake”). And it seems that on some level, my director is saying that that’s wrong. Obviously it’s important not to make mistakes, but it is not as important as making music musical. And what makes music musical is the minutia, the smallest sips of breath, the contrast between loud and not so loud, the fractions of seconds that space notes. So how are these two things balanced? Human capacity is boundless and incredible in many ways, but I feel like in a rehearsal situation, the number of things that I can focus on a reasonable juggle to effective execution is finite. Additionally, I don’t believe that what he’s suggesting is that one ought to under every circumstance attain mastery of material such that making rhythmic/pitch errors are unthinkable, and one only needs to focus on details, because he explicitly states that given a choice between complete rhythmic/pitch accuracy and appropriately executed detailistic choices, details are more important.

What I’m left to ponder is where is that threshold? What is the appropriate balance between attention to what is on the page and the details of the music? At what point does one decide to pivot from focusing on one to focusing on the other? Frankly, I don’t have an answer to this, but I think that it’s a massively important thing to understand. A similar approach to this concept would be to explore the question of which ensemble would you rather listen to? One that tends towards less precision is stylistic detail or one that tends towards more innaccurate pitches and rhythms? I think for me, the answer would have to be the latter. How I would listen to a band that makes some errors in pitches and rhythms is that these are distractions. They are inclusions or artifacts in a material of fine quality. However, how I would listen to an ensemble that has complete accuracy but no musicality in their details is that the fundamental substance of their performance is not so great as the other ensemble. I suppose that this perception isn’t too far off. How many beginner bands are there where they have complete accuracy in pitch and rhythm? . . . Okay probably not that many, but if they did, would that make them as good as the Chicago Symphony? My point is that what makes a beginner band a beginner band isn’t their accuracy to what is written, it is their understanding and execution of certain musical concepts. I think that what my director aims to teach is that these concepts are expressed through the details. I suppose similarly, what makes a player like Bud Herseth an extraordinary professional isn’t the fact that he allegedly never missed or even chipped a single note, but rather with the level of musicality to which he played.

I don’t know if this will or should in any way translate to my approach to music, because previous to this conversation, I already held both priorities in high regard, and I don’t think that this idea truly disparages the importance of either of them, but merely questions the ultimate importance of any of them.

x

Falling

The Marching Arts

I have a strong premonition that most of the people that read this blog know me personally. I have also not made an insignificant number of posts dealing with the subject of the trumpet. I am taking the assumption that either knowing me in person or having seen those posts on this blog are sufficient conditions for knowing that I am a band person.

I think that there is a great misconception about the label of someone in "band". Compared to orchestra, for example, band instruments play a great diversity of styles. Someone's experience as part of a wind choir is going to be infinitely different from someone's experience being in a jazz combo. I am personally very involved with a specific style of "band", which is the marching ensemble. The tragedy is that these ensembles are currently being threatened by the deforestation of fine arts defunding. Programs across the nation are either being directly cut or are otherwise suffering the effects of such cuts.

The value of education has long been monetized. I don't think that there is any debate about that. What I revile is that it is increasingly privatized. Monetization alone is simply a way of quantifying something's value. For somethings this is appropriate. Like a bushel of apples. For other things it is not. Like a human life. My intention is not to argue whether or not education ought to be monetized. My argument intends to rest on the assumption that so long as the things that valued properly, their benefit can be accurately assessed. I believe that the problem arises when unknown detriments are incurred once the value of fine arts programs are overlooked. One quick thing: there is a strong cognitive bias when I say the word "education", especially in the context of a discussion about schools, to think of the traditional fundaments of literature, english, mathematics, and sciences. What I intend to address is education in the strictest sense, but of a different sort. I also want to make it clear that I here have no intention to espouse the benefits of a musical education. I frankly don't understand how this matter can be so conclusively proven and yet so contested.

Certain aspects of schooling have become outright privatized. For instance, the majority of schools themselves never provide lunch for their students. They get a private company to do that. Most schools have contracts with textbook manufacturers instead of generating their own material. This itself may and or may not be a bad thing. The problem is that a schools are beginning to change their model into one that prioritizes getting the most for their money. Like any investments, it's natural for the overlords of these institutions to want to invest the most in the area that they see the most returns. For instance, since scrutiny of the academic competitiveness of primary and secondary schools has recently skyrocketed, many institutions are prioritizing this. The resources for the school such as the school's budget, facilities, staff, and administrative capacity have been directed towards the furthering of this goal. This is paralleled by the demand of these institutions on their students to likewise invest their time and energy. This is not simply a pull force. It is also a push force. The effect is that fine arts programs, particularly in music, are being reduced, redacted, and made redundant.

Why is this? Well there are several realities to contend with. The first is that a music program always includes a premium. Instruments are expensive. Their cost is not only a one-time investment, there is the continual cost of their maintenance and the cost to replace them when they inevitably become unusable. There is also the fact that the learning curve on musical instruments can often seem as barren as the Atacama Desert. It takes many more years to develop anything that would be commonly lauded for its musical merit than a typical student spends at a single school. An average American high school is four years. An average middle school is three. An exceptional music program typically doesn't include elementary schools children for more than three years. It is glaringly apparent to anyone who has tried that this is nowhere near enough time to "get good". Additionally, music by nature is noncompetitive. Of course people make competitions out of it, but that is a superstructure. It's not like a school basketball team where performance can be gauged against another school, as a way for justifying the cost of the program. Music is subjective. So imagine an elementary school program that normally begins students in 3rd grade. The superintendent decides to cancel this program on the basis of its expenses and the fact that the end of year concert for 5th graders still sounds like a flock of Canadian geese and bull elephant calls. Suddenly, instead of getting students with three years of experience, the middle school program has to dedicate its first year to teaching which fingers to press and how to read music. Suddenly, the quality of their ensembles takes a nosedive, and one can imagine how this buck gets passed around. Then at the high school level, the superintendent tells the director to think of ways to improve the quality of the band, when really the only thing that can really be done is for the superintendent himself to go yell at the district budget committee on behalf of the elementary school not to cut its program. Obviously this rarely ever happens.

This situation is even more aggravated in marching ensembles because their membership exists on a recursive trend of increasing exclusivity. Despite being multi-disciplinary (requiring for example a high level of both athleticism as well as musicianship), the near comprehensive majority of people that join a marching ensemble come from a band background. This group of people is a subset of so many sets that there are really quite few people (percentage wise) that find themselves in a position to be successful in the activity.

We are a dying breed. Those of us that run and play, those of us that know to count our steps and stay in line. Those of us that can look sideways without turning or head, and point our toes to the sky. There used to be many but now there are few, of those that can twist their hips and slide. The details, the beats, the turf, the seats. We are indeed a dying breed.

Into the Dark

It was a wonder to behold. It’s bezeled edges caught the light as he held it in his hands. In it was more computational capacity than man used to reach the moon. Its ability to access the silent waves of telecommunications enabled any knowledge, true or false, to be summoned to its lighted screen in a mere matter of seconds. It was without a doubt, the paragon of human technology. This slab of steel, glass, and copper, this handheld torch into the unknown of darkness, loneliness, and ignorance. When in need of knowledge, when in need of distraction, when seeking after a love or a lust, there need be nowhere else to turn but to this device.

It’ll be obsolete in a year or two, and he, like most people, will be inclined to buy a new one. To trade the fruit of many hours of life in return for that connection, that distraction, that outlet for availability again. Society as a whole had decided that that was what they wanted. They wanted to feel close to the light in their hands, and far from the darkness outside. They wanted to see the pictures of their loved ones, and hear songs that made them feel a certain way. They wanted to know that at least a little bit of who they were, could somehow, somehow, somewhere, make a difference in someone’s life, or at least what they professed it to be.

He placed it gently on the table, and turned it off. It used to never be turned off, and it would light and buzz day and night, alerting him to people that did things in places for reasons. And he felt informed. He felt safe, he felt warm, he felt happy. But his happiness did not lead to joy. The smiles of profiles and the shenanigans of cats did not cause any jubilation to become his own. Happiness was not what it once was. It was thin, and light, and constantly attended to. It needed to be recharged, it needed to be squirreled away in pockets and purses to always be pulled out and always be touched, but protected, for its fragility mandated that it be so treated.

He stared at it for a while. He knew part of him wanted to pick it back up and be with it. As the last flickers died from the screen, he closed his eyes and breathed. His world felt a little more silent without the noise, the waves of interference. The hunger for more- the pictures, the knowledge, the understanding, the exposure, the sensation, the enthralling captivity, it all cried out as he turned and walked away. With every step he felt lighter, with every breath he felt fuller as the atoms of air in his lungs filled his chest and crept into his body, pushing out the exhale that it was exchanged for. He felt his muscles relax, muscles that he didn’t know were tense. As he walked through his house, turning off the lights in each room, his brow settled into a gently curving line, free of tension. His arms fell to his sides, with nothing to hold, and nothing to protect, he swung them as he walked. After going from room to room unplugging alarm clocks, televisions, computers, stereos, he came upon his kitchen. He unplugged the toaster oven and the microwave, letting the cords drop like hungry serpents from his hands onto the linoleum tile, where they lay coiled.

The faucet groaned and sighed as he filled a cup with water and brought it to his lips. He held the cup with both hands, feeling the ceramic warm from his skin and cool from the water. The water tasted the way water does, for all intents and purposes tasteless, but never perfectly so. He felt it run down his throat into the cavernous mechanism that would process and utilize it in a perfected biological clockwork. He set the cup on the counter with a gentle clink, and turned to look at the window. The night was warm and inviting.

The moonlight called to him with its unattainable allure, its pale beckoning, nestled in the brotherhood of stars. The trees swayed their branches as a warm summer breeze pushing through the skies and clouds, rusling every blade of grass and leaf in gentle caress.

He opened the door and set one foot outside, suddenly paused. It wasn’t fear, it wasn’t anxiety, it wasn’t obligation that stayed his body across the threshold, it was a simple desire. It was a want to mark this moment, to take it in as soon as it passed, to hold tightly and never let go of this moment with the world in front of him, and the world behind him. He stepped into the night and the moon and stars twinkling looked upon his figure fading quickly into the night.

Race to the Finish

Before I begin talking about this topic, I think I need to first establish a disclaimer: anything I talk about here, or really ever on this blog, unless otherwise indicated, is almost always a matter of my personal opinion and based on my experience. My interpretation, while functionally irrefutable, is also highly subjective. I ask that any reader realize such, and judge accordingly.

When discrimination is brought up, I immediately think of the history of the American south, the Rwandan genocide, or the indian caste system. These are all prime examples, I think, of discrimination. So compared to this, people talk about discrimination in America, my first reaction is that I have no idea what they're talking about. Well, The truth is, I discriminate. Against most people I run into. A lot. However, I don't discriminate on the basis of race. I don't think anything could be so errant and idiotic. I discriminate based on things like intelligence and mannerism. The truth is, time and energy are limited resources, and I like to hedge my bets on the people that I think both mean the most to me, and that I mean the most to. However, just because I internally discriminate in this way against a rude fast food employee who speaks to me with aggressive flippancy and shoves my change at me, the extent of my discrimination goes no further than a mental note that in the event of a zombie apocalypse, I wouldn't want him or her on my team. I still try to say thank you, make eye contact, and conduct myself in a generally amiable and proper manner. I don't think that, while "discriminate" is an ugly word, people object to this particular form of it. No, racial discrimination has a different flavor entirely. But the matter still remains that when people say they've discriminated against, they hardly ever mean that they were denied the right to vote, or that they were denied service in a store or restaurant, or even that someone spat at them or cursed at them, or stopped their child from playing with theirs on account of their race. Now, I'm sure that there are still instances of this going on, and the recent trend of reports of police brutality certainly prove this to be the point. But where I happen to be now, on a college campus in an affluent corner of the american northeast, so far as I am concerned, there is no racial discrimination of this type. However, people that I've talked to have said that there is discrimination here amongst the happy pretty stone buildings of this campus, and though, as a minority, I personally haven't felt much if any discrimination against myself, these people whom I've talked to, so far as I can tell, are reasonable, well meaning, intelligent, honest people. That leads me to wonder why it is that their conclusion is so startling different from mine. I see no one's civil rights or liberties being infringed on, I see no segregated bathrooms or drinking fountains, a great number of people that I run into on a daily basis are minorities, and they seem to be doing well enough. This leads me to conclude that the claim that racist discrimination is still a problem is invalid, at least for this place and this time.

I don't want to do that, because while it would be easy for me to dismiss their claims as the byproducts of narcissistic acrimonious pedantry, I do respect them as people and friends, and I very much want to respect their views; I think that that alone is enough premise to warrant a little more consideration. So in an effort to understand their claim, I decided to really look at the kind of actions that they find themselves subject to, that they label racial discrimination. And I found that what they mostly referred to was a very real phenomenon not of anything like denial of rights, but rather a separation between people of different backgrounds. When I say different backgrounds, I mean, of course, race, but also things like socioeconomic status, as well as customs, traditions, and upbringings. As diverse as this can sound, I think it's well recognized that there is a correlation between race and these other things. And while it certainly bears to mention that these other issues warrant address and solving on their own, the one I will continue to pursue here is the matter of race. The separations caused by race are a real issue, because if a person observes that everyone of their skin color or physical appearance is isolating themselves from the larger collective, they are more likely to do so. Once they do so, they are likely to be expected to do so, which leads to them being encouraged to do so. Given America's history of not being so nice to certain minorities, for instance, African Americans, it is no small wonder that this separation is perceived to be vestigial of that time and mode of thinking. Especially if a child grows up in such an environment, these minorities are in effect socially conditioned to accept this as a fact, a status quo that they are expected to follow and fear the repercussions of deviating from. This expectation leads to adherence, and adherences perpetuates the separation. Separation is a problem, because in many ways, self-segregation is no better than segregation. When a group of people share such an identity as a common minority race, it's difficult for people outside that race to see past that and very easy for them to dismiss them for it. While individually, these people may be recognized in conversation to be the fine, upstanding human beings that they actually are, when they are seen together, the are slapped with the label of racial identity. Once this happens often enough and for long enough, this sense of being labeled transcends the social behavior from whence it came, and people are often seen as only their race, and thus are still treated as isolated even when they're not actively isolating themselves. This is the racial discrimination that people are facing today. It's not being condemned to sit at the back of the bus anymore, it's being condemned to sit alone. And that is a real problem.

To combat this, one must first distinguish the fundamental differences between these types of discrimination. Whereas the first kind, let's call institutional discrimination, is perpetuated by social creed and often by governments (officially or unofficially), who if not out right support it, enable it by turning a blind eye to the issue. Institutional discrimination often takes the form of concrete denial of rights, different treatments and opportunities for the groups involved, and dismissal of human integrity on the count of race. The discrimination I described earlier, the discrimination of today, let's call implicit discrimination. This is often takes the form of social norms, perpetuation by figures of authority, such as teachers and administration (by the turning of a blind eye to these issues), different opportunities for the parties involved, and a dismissal of a person's human qualities on account of their race. Seems similar doesn't it? Startlingly so. However I have found that the biggest difference is this: institutional racial discrimination is a product of hatred, and implicit racial discrimination is a product of fear. There is no stronger human impulse than the urge to fear things that are different from what you're comfortable with, and more so different from yourself. It's no small wonder, then that in this day and age, when so much emphasis is put by nearly every society on clothing, and hairstyle, and general matters of appearance, that that's all we often end up seeing. After all, skin is only skin deep. The matter here is not to try to overcome this racial divide and shallow perception by combating hatred. In many a judicial case, crimes perpetuated by racism are often classified as a "hate crime". Judicial rulings, laws, prosecutions, and in general the judicial and legislative systems of government are effective ways of dealing with hatred. That's not to say that they can stop anyone from feeling hate. One of the side effects of living in a country with freedoms is that anyone has the right to be a bigoted racist if they want. The laws, however, can prosecute and ensure that no bodily or civic harm manifests from that. But like hatred, everyone is free to fear, and there's no authoritative figure that can really influence that to an effective degree. I believe that the way to combat this fear is through fostering personal relations between people from which we have nothing to fear from except fear itself, i.e. people simply different from us. If we want to solve the problem of implicit racism, we need to create a society that doesn't value how someone's hair looks, what clothes they wear, how big their biceps or how slender their legs are. There needs to be a society that sees people as first and foremost human. These qualities of physical appearance should not be understood to be diminishing of human worth, but rather additive to it. Nothing about how a person looks, speaks, lives, eats should change the fact that they are fundamentally human, and while they may not make the short list for your zombie survival team, they should make the long list of brothers and sisters in humanity.

Family

When someone is asked who are the people they love, family members will almost always be named. Most commonly a parent, but quite often a sibling, uncle, aunt, or grandparent will appear too. From my limited exposure to the world, this seems to be the case regardless of culture and creed. Everywhere you go, there is not only this understanding of more or less what a family is, but also that you should love them. I don't believe that anyone is explicitly taught that they should have a family and love them.

A family, typialy, contains an ableistic and temporal hierarchy between a "parent" generation and an "offspring" generation. At the beginning of their lives, the members of the offspring generation are entirely dependent, more often than not on the parent generation. Throughout their upbringing, the parents provide the offspring with more than just care and materialistic provision, but rather with characteristics that differ from parental unit to parental unit. Things like moralistic values, personality traits, arguably even sense of humor. Regardless of genetic predisposition, most commonly aided by the nature of the biological parenthood, these qualities and characteristics are undeniably exposed to and often imbued in the offspring. In this way, the keeping and raising of a family can seem entirely narcissistic, i.e. you only care for others under the condition that they are very much like you, and that their preservation is in essence tantamount to yours. Many a scientific mind would probably explain why so many animals across so many branches of the phylogenetic tree exhibit familial behavior. However, I speak here not of the lions, the wildebeests, and the swans. I speak of humankind. We, with our artificial shells of concrete and bureaucracy have in many ways transcended the need for simple food and shelter, and yet the family is still as integral a part of our civilization as ever. In a the pseudo-welfare state of this country at least, there are many places where one can find the means of physical provision. However, that is not enough. The need for family is more than the needs for physical things.

I firmly believe that within each human being, there are two impulses- an impulse to good and an impulse to evil (a yetzer hatov and yetzer hara, if you will). The impulse to evil thrives in differences and isolation. Consider the atrocities that have been committed when people are divided into "us" and "them", or blended into the camouflage of anonymity. When looking at the differences between another human and you, it's easy to disregard their humanity, and thus easier to no longer treat them the way you otherwise would. Conversely, the impulse to good dwells in seeking those common bonds between all mankind, to realize the fears and loves in tumultuous conflict inside each beating heart. Seeing this is what can make us kind and loving, human and humane. There in the family, is one of the deepest manifestations of this phenomenon. Because the people in our family are often so like us and we are in a position to fully realize that, our impulse to good is obstinately prodded. To look at a family member and their similarities to you is to not only acknowledge their mutual humanity, but to see your humanity in them. What they are, who they are, their dreams and desires, are undeniably commensurate to your own. How then, could you not want to be the best you can possibly be to them? How could you not want to be excellent? How could you not love them? Our families are more than arbitrary groups of people boxed in by societal utilitarianism and expectation. They are the the greatest testament to the human capacity of love that we can possibly find. The love that we want to be offered and offer ourselves is exactly the love that we have a chance to give to those who are the closest to us.