[E]ach time she’d grown and changed, I had felt something open up in myself. Her changes had become prompts that pushed me toward a higher, truer version of myself, just as my changes had been for her. Change answering change, it was a virtuous loop.
With your children, it becomes very clear that the love you feel has little to do with who they are or what they do.
In more superficial relationships […] you assign value to the other person because of what they do. […] But with your children, the value, to a large extent, flows in the other direction.
Adult love isn’t fully unconditional like this. There are things you would never value, even if your lover does, and there are things they could value that would make you stop loving them. But still, there is a sense that to love someone means to extend your care to the things your partner cares about to some degree.
[T]here are […] two levels at which you can extend your values like this. On the first level, you do what I did when I cut down the pines; you do it out of duty and without connecting to the values.
[T]his kind of care that doesn’t come from a deeply felt space can be grating and unpleasant both for you and the person you give it to.
[T]here is a second level at which to approach this, a more transformative level. It is when you actually learn to feel what the other person is feeling. It is when you stretch out with your imagination into the unknown and learn to merge their values and perspective into your worldview. This is one of the most profound experiences that love gifts us.
To aspire is to want to want something before you actually want it.
The aspirant sees that she does not have the values that she would like to have, and therefore seeks to move herself toward a better valuational condition. She senses that there is more out there to value than she currently values, and she strives to come to see what she cannot yet get fully into view. (Agnes Callard, Aspiration)
If I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal. (Iris Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts”)
[T]his, to me, is one of the most profound rewards of love: that it can expand you so that more of the world becomes real to you. You can provide others with the love and care they need to transform and discover new aspects of themselves and of reality, and then, by meeting them where they are now, you can learn to see what they do, and so see further.
Which will change you.
And so change them again.