A New Year Wish from Dr. Hallowell
By Dr. Edward Hallowell
Happy 2022 to you all! May this new year bring health, joy, and fulfillment to you all.
I have one wish that I want to share. Of course, I have many wishes, as do we all, but this one lies at the top of my list.
My wish is that each one of you fall in love. With a person, sure, but also with an idea, with a musical instrument, with a cuisine, with an author, with a band, with a spot near the sea or a lake, with a dream you hope to make come true, with a movie, with a time in history, with a Great Woman or a Great Man, with a new method for scrambling eggs.
With just about anything. Because when you fall in love you endow the object of your love with your most precious energies, energies that transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. That’s what love does. It works magic. It takes a regular person and turns him or her into the exceptional, your dream come true.
But the force of love also takes a book you haven’t read until now and turns it into the Best Book Ever, the book that you can neither put down nor forget, the book you reread every year or two. It takes a chance meeting with a friend and deepens that moment into a bond the two of you never forget. It takes a quick glance at a painting and leaves you staring at it for a half and hour. It changes an accidental whiff of a scent into the perfume you just have to get. It lifts the restaurant you visit because it was the only one with an open reservation into the restaurant you’ve been looking for forever.
Love is the magical force we all have stored up inside but use all too infrequently. And yet, ask yourself, what supplies me with the joy and satisfaction I cherish the most in my life? The answer is probably your loves. You are happy in direct proportion to the number and depths of your loves.
Some of these loves cause you pain, the worst pain being when you lose one of them to death or some other demise. Some loves weave pain and joy together inextricably, and that’s just the price you have to pay for being in love.
One of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned is that all human love is ambivalent, meaning that all the love we feel for another person has some small measure of love’s opposite mixed in. There are times and days when you don’t even like him, let alone love him. That’s just the way it is. All human love is ambivalent.
Even your love for Beethoven’s 4th. piano concerto diminishes when you hear it played on a day when you’re in a sour mood. Or your love for walking on the beach becomes a chore when it’s too cold out, or you’re not feeling it that day. All of our supposedly dependable joys in life can become undependable, even tedious or downright unpleasant at certain times.
But that’s ok. Because what love gives far surpasses what it costs or takes away.
My wish for all of you, and for myself, is that we deepen our loves and add to their number this year. And that the pain love causes us never leads us to give up on love, to hunker down in isolation as if to find shelter from the storm.
Feed your loves and let them feed you. We’re all hungry in this life, so let us each find ways to feed each other and to feed our loves every day.
Love is our magical tool, ready to be picked up by our imagination every moment and directed outward, transforming whatever it hits into all we ever need.
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