Permission to Love

I Love To write Love on her arms and similar organizations, like Music Saves and the One campaign.  It seems as though, although this adds good and bad aspects to charities, charity and doing good things have meshed with pop culture to raise awareness and increase the desire to do good.  Young people are always at the forefront of breakthroughs big movements regarding peace and change.  With the ease of communication, this has never been easier to voice our opinion and join up with a cause.
  However, in working with college students and other young people (and being one myself) it all comes back to Love.  "Love is all we need", go figure right.  No really.  The thing that nobody tells you, is that its hard.  Damn hard.  For some, its near impossible. 
  But as young people, we experience so very much.  This is a world of influences; peer pressures, media pressures, family pressure, significant other stress, and, of course, in the world of higher education, information overload.  Yet life seems to be a little more simple when you take a step back from it all.  These influences, although many are actually quite good, can be at best time consuming, at worst, they can absolutely rule our lives.  It is easy to get overwhelmed by it all.  It is, perhaps, even easier to just throw in the towel.  Life, love, happiness and all that.  Right.
  We become so inundated with all that's happening that we forget why it is we are actually roaming this blue and green expanse.  Bogged down by the "weight of the world".  So confused about what to think and who we actually are that are opinions and views are no longer our own.  We feel like we need to wait on others to act so we can come up with an appropriate reaction.  It's as if nothing we do seems quite right.

 Well, it is not.  The world has been turned upside down; many times over.  The economies, the environment, the disasters, the wars; the oppression.

I can confidently say, most of us have it easy in America.  Yet the hurt and affliction we experience are still present.  Sure, we don't have disease epidemics so much or guerrilla warfare in our streets, but we have are not without.  Our pain just takes on a different name.  For young people, it is depression, despair and loneliness that seem to be our biggest issues.  In a time where communication is at a surplus, we are feeling more alone than ever.  Call it what you will,we are oppressed.  The oppressed are held captive. Although we are not so much held captive (depending on how you look at it) we are still in need of an escape; we need to be freed; we need a command; its as if we need permission.

Although there is always more to the story, I believe it can all be summed up by allowing ourselves and others the permission to Love.

Tell some one you love or even somebody you barely know, Tell them its ok to love.  To them to go ahead.  It may seem strange at first, but imagine if we all felt it?  If we all knew it?  If we all lived it?