Category: What Love Really Means

Our Essence Becomes Entwined

2/9/2018

Rabbi Laszlo Berkowits

The Actual Dance describes a love relationship that is so deep that the spiritual essence of two people merge so that they make the other complete. “I am the other half of that which makes Susan and me complete.”   I have written a poem that describes it as being “an equal half of the other.”

Today, February 9th, 2018, as I am prepare to host a dinner celebration of the 90th Birthday of Rabbi Laszlo Berkowits I am brought to consider once again the myriad shapes and forms of love between people. I have known Rabbi Berkowits for 45 years. In that time, and especially the last twenty years, we have spent enormous amounts of time with each other in highly intimate situations. His first trip back to Auschwitz where as a 16-year-old boy he spent not quite a year. His first trip back to Camp Woebbelin in Germany where he was liberated May 2, 1945 by the 82nd Airborne. Then four more times back to Woebbelin. Visits together to the Berlin Memorial to the Holocaust and the Jewish museum in Berlin.

There were other times with other intimate, incredible moments of awe and desperation and celebration and joy. He has taught me to seek the joy of each moment of each day of life.

And now, as I get ready for this fabulous evening of celebration in deep introspection, I think I understand something new about love and life.   My perfect love with my wife, Susan, of 51 years that has taught me so much is unique and not exclusive.   What I realize today on the 90th Birthday of Laszlo Berkowits is that we as human beings connect with others similarly; interactions and shared experiences so deep that the space between us disappears and we become connected as deeply and as completely as if we were physical one. We are spiritually one. This is possible because love is infinite and to be found and discovered between two people through different and complex interactions.

               So here are a few links that will introduce you to Rabbi Laszlo Berkowits, my friend who I have come to love and with whom I am in some ways one. Let's start with his book: The Boy Who Lost his Birthday, here And some wonderful interviews with him here and here and here.

Are there people in your lives that you love in this deep, intimate way? Tell us about them.

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NATIONAL FAMILY CAREGIVERS MONTH 2017

11/23/2017

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What better day than Thanksgiving to acknowledge the important role of the Family Caregivers. November is National Family Caregivers Month. You can read the Presidential Proclamation right here:

     When I think of National Family Caregivers Month I think of my friend Greg Johnson, who through his inspired work in supporting international family caregivers has been a major factor in my own understanding of that role and has inspired me to continue my own passion for mission of The Actual Dance: To enable as many people as possible to experience the show.

     On today, Thanksgiving 2017, I want to express my gratitude to all those are, have been or will be family caregivers.    It is a task of the heart – and defines what love really means. Among the many things that Greg has taught me is that The Actual Dance is, among many things, a different face of the Family Caregiver.

I have since come to understand the role of Caregiver to someone you love as a complex and multi-layered relationship. As so many things for which we are thankful, being able to be a caregiver to someone you love is one of them, even though we certainly would have preferred otherwise: That is, the most important often difficult things in life require unknown capacities within ourselves to do the unthinkable.

The truth for me and the point of The Actual Dance is that care giving for someone you love is indeed what love really means.

   Please enjoy the following resources provided by Greg on the many roles in Family Caregivers:

You Are Not Alone Series:

TALKS WITH GREG: Conversations in Caregiving

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Breast Cancer Awareness Month Blog: Day 24 B'shert

10/24/2017

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The Actual Dance as a play presents the events of the year 2000 from my point of view as the spouse of the woman going through breast cancer. Now, seventeen years later, it is apparent that I did not fully understand how deeply the experience impacted me. It took me 12 years to write the story, so to speak, and the last nearly 5 years I have been telling it through performances of the play. Every October I blog daily to help in raising awareness and to share elements of the story that I hope are of value to those who read these blogs. (All quoted lines are text from the play.)

Day 24: B’Shert “I remember the first time I ever noticed Susan. We hadn’t met yet.”

A good time to take a break from the unfolding story of me getting ready to be with Susan in what seems like a story without a good ending to talk a little bit about “us”

In the play I tell the story of how Susan and I noticed each other at a B’nai B’rith Youth Organization convention in 1961 in Texarkana, Texas. We just made googly-eyes at each other but never talked. Then three years later Susan ends-up going to College in El Paso at Texas Western College and I am still living at home and I am going to Texas Western.

It turns out that Susan starts dating a guy named Steve and I a girl named Jane. On a “double date” over to Juarez one night probably in 1964 we end up switching --- Jane is in the front seat with Steve and Susan in the back seat with me on the way back from Juarez.

In the play I say: “It didn’t take us very long to fall in love” and then “In 1965 we decided to we wanted to get married.”

As I sit back and reflect on what is now a journey of 53 years since that first date, I believe that some things are in fact destined to happen. Some force outside of what we as humans can fully understand can bring people together for a purpose. The Yiddish phrase is “B’shert” Meant to be.

I do think that Susan and Sam were meant-to-be and that the unfolding story of our lives is a sacred journey.

Stat of the Day: There are about 6,200 wedding a day in the United States with the average age of the bride being 25.3 years and the average age of the groom being 26.9 years. Source

Task of the Day: Say “I love you” to your spouse.   “I love you simply awakens the US in you and me.”

Resource of the Day: Okay—I have given this link before – it isn’t quite what I’m talking about and yet it will make your day. What Love Really Means by JJ Heller.

The Actual Dance: Performances.   Donate.

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WHAT LOVE DOESN'T REALLY MEAN

9/11/2017

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The Actual Dance is a love story.   I like to say it is about “what love really means.”   In the play, there is this line: “At 20 years old I don’t think we understood what love really meant.”   The reference is to Susan Simon, my wife of now 51 years, and me when we got married in 1966. We of course thought we were in love, but what really did two twenty-year old kids know about love?

What I have come to understand is that love is a process made up of intimate, existential moments together.   Two people discovering an eternal bond that connects not mind but soul.

This comes up because of an opinion piece in the Sunday, September 10th, New York Times titled: “How to Fix the Person You Love,” by Eli J. Finkel.   It turns out that this is preview (marketing) piece for a forthcoming book titled: “The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work.”

Let’s start with the fatal flaw in the book. It is impossible for the authors to know how the “Beset Marriages Work” because we – Susan and I – were not interviewed.

Second, and more seriously, judged by the opinion-piece, the measure applied to “Best Marriages” has not thing to do with love, but rather the external-relationship between two people. The idea the authors seem to wrestle with is can you live with what I will call a “life coach.”   Or in the author’s words: “…. some marriages can do it all. . .. [A]ffectionate partners can indeed play a critical role in determining each other’s success in reach their goals.”

What does this mean? Hard to know exactly without reading the entire book, but the hint is pretty clear: “[R]eceiving such support can be brutal.”

Perhaps the real cue here is the reference to “affectionate partners” to describe the two people in a marital relationship. I sort of get their point and perspective. The external process of supporting and “pushing” a spouse to be the best they can be at their chosen vocation can be brutal.

I however don’t think that has anything to do with love.   I prefer Jacob Needleman’s approach in his book: “The Wisdom of Love: Toward a Shared Inner Life.”    I have written about this before. Needleman describes marriage not as a living arrangement of “affectionate partners” but instead is of a fabric of connection between two souls on a single journey together.   Rather as a quality of connectiveness that is at a spiritual level not readily understood or experienced except upon continued commitment to a journey and the relationship.

The Actual Dance is a case study in that discovery, in that journey. The “brutality” of this journey isn’t getting unbearable pressure from one’s partner to be the “best we can be.” The brutality is in achieving the state of near perfect empathy.   Needleman says it this way: “We fail to realize that in certain rare moments – for example where we come face to face with death – we touch a completely unknown capacity of love within us.”

To be in love, he argues, and I do paraphrase, is to be in relationship with a person to be capable of such love in any situation in life. That is: “To be toward another person in a way that supports (their) struggle is the full meaning of … love.”   “To be in this way toward the man or woman with whom we are sharing our life is to approach a transcendent purpose with the sometimes wondrous and sometimes agonizing round of joy and sorrow that makes up all of our lives together no matter how they may be judged according to the standards of society.”

And so, in The Actual Dance as I journey toward that anticipated moment of Susan’s last breath, I begin to understand:

“I am the other half of that which makes us, Susan and me, complete. When else in our lives is it more important to be whole than when our body is badly broken.”

What love then “really means” in my book is that we become “an equal half” of a single whole – the relationship itself. We are one. What it doesn’t mean? It doesn’t mean me berating her (or vice versa) to be the best whatever we can be in the rough and tumble life a dog-eat-dog, race to the top of anything. Perhaps I overreact to the example chosen by Eli J. Finkel for his New York Times piece: The relationship between Katinka Hosszu and Shane Tusup, where Tusup becomes her Olympic coach and trains her to gold medals. That is NOT what love really means, doing that and staying married may be a fete, but it isn’t the meaning of love.

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What I Need to Know

1/13/2017

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The Actual Dance is a love story.   It is about the discovery of what love really means.   It starts in the middle – in our 33rd year of marriage.   The real beginning is when “I first notice Susan. We had not met yet.” It was when we were 16 years old.

Meeting someone and eyeballing them in that “16 year old boy sort of way,” getting married and staying that way for 33 years was both the hard part and the easy part. Anyone who has been married a very long time knows that the path is not always downhill. It is often uphill and around blind curves. By 33 though it is pretty much an integral way of life.

So when in our 33rd year of marriage Susan was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer that spread to her lymph nodes, I was confronted with the prospect of losing her.   What I needed to know, then, was “how am I going to do this?”

I turned first to the Rabbi of our Temple.   This encounter is a seminal moment in my existential “dance” and is a featured scene in The Actual Dance. It was a meeting destined to go wrong. Not a carefully planned counseling session set up through the office manager; but instead I show up at the Temple on a Tuesday night at 9:30 because it is “committee night” and I expect the Rabbi to be there. As it turns out, I run into the Rabbi in the hallway – “Oh, Hi Sam?” An unspoken, “what are you doing here?”

I clamor into the Rabbi’s office exclaiming I need to talk and the Rabbi is packing up to go home.   I write this back-story to explain the “disconnect.” I tell the Rabbi “I need to talk about Susan.” And in the moment the Rabbi expresses empathy: “Oh, you are sad that Susan won’t see the grandkids grow up.”

Sounds horribly wrong, right? Well 13 years after the fact that is how I have been treating that incident. Thanks however to the distance and perspective offered by the performance of The Actual Dance by Chuk Obasi, I can see that what happened in that room is arguably much different than I remember it.   I respond in the play with internal anger: “NO NO IT IS NONE OF THAT, I scream silently.” Is the line. Then I say: “What I need to know is how am I going to do this. How am I going to dance the last dance with Susan?”

Two points. First, this IS the question that every lover, spouse, caregiver has when faced with being with the person they love most in the world as they take their last breath. Second, it isn’t obvious.   It is the question in retrospect, but not in the moment.   I now realize that back in the year 2000 as this was happening I did NOT really know what I needed. Empathy might have been in. Just an ear to listen; or maybe a shoulder to cry on.

The truth is I didn’t know what I needed to know until I needed to know it.   This “aha moment” is a reminder of how deeply personal the ritual of this “dance” is and that the unfolding of it in real-time for anyone is confusing.   My portrayal of the Rabbi scene in the show is in some ways deeply unfair to the Rabbi. I perform it as if the Rabbi made a stupid mistake; instead of the gift of simply being there for me and allowing me to find out “What I need to know.”

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Welcome to October Breast Cancer Awareness Month -- Day 28

10/28/2015

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October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The Actual Dance is about many different things. It is about breast cancer. It is also about love. It is also about relationships.   It is also about spirituality and what life really is.   It is about a lot of things.

In October in recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness I will post a daily blog with a reflection about breast cancer. The reflections will stem from something in the play. (All quoted lines are text from the play.)

Day 28 What Love Really Means. I finally understood with just a few words from the psychiatrist I hadn’t seen in maybe 20 years that The Actual Dance was going to be the ultimate consummation of our – Susan and My -- love. “His words have a dramatic effect on me.”   Yes, the prospect of losing the love of your life is terrifying. “I … feared it as tragic and devastating.”   Instead, with just two words “it’s beautiful” my heart and soul waken to what love really means.   The privilege and honor of holding in my arms the person whose essence and soul I share as she leaves this world and she does so sensing and knowing that she is loved. Earlier in the show I talk about how Susan and I met (noticing each other first in 1962) and in 1965 deciding to get married. “I wonder if two 20 year olds really understood what love meant,” is my line. On reflection of course the answer is no, they could not. It has taken me nearly 50 years to understand that what love really means. It means knowing the “beauty and dignity” inherent in being with the person you love most in the world as they take their last breath. When circumstances do not allow us to be physically present at that time, when someone or something else takes that life away or we are far away, The Actual Dance still takes place, just in different ways and different forms. I do believe that the love inside of you not only goes with you, it also goes with the one we love.

Stat of the Day: Men get breast cancer too.   About 2,350 new cases of invasive breast cancer are expected to be diagnosed in men in 2015. A man’s lifetime risk of breast cancer is about 1 in 1,000.

Task of the Day: Say “I love you” to the person(s) you love most in the world at least three times today and every day: In the morning, in the evening and at bed time.

Resource of the Day: I found a song about “What Love Really Means” Check it out I enjoyed it and I think you will too.

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Welcome to October Breast Cancer Awareness Month --- Day 29

10/29/2014

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October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The Actual Dance is, among many different things, about breast cancer. It is also about love. It is also about relationships. It is also about spirituality and what life really is. It is about a lot of things.

In October in recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness I will post a daily blog with a reflection about breast cancer. The reflections will stem from something in the play. (All quoted lines are text from the play.)

Day 29 What Love Really Means. I finally understood with just a few words from the psychiatrist I had not seen in maybe 15 years that The Actual Dance was going to be the ultimate consummation of our – Susan and my -- love. “His words have a dramatic effect on me.” Yes, the prospect of losing the love of your life is scary. “I … feared it as tragic and devastating.” Instead, with just two words -- “it’s beautiful” -- my heart and soul waken to what love really means. The privilege and honor of holding in my metaphorical arms the person whose essence and soul I share as they leave this world and do so sensing and knowing that they are loved. Earlier in the show I talk about how Susan and I met (noticing each other first in 1962) and in 1965 deciding to get married. “I wonder if two 20 year olds really understood what love meant,” is my line. On reflection of course the answer is no, they could not. It has taken me nearly 50 years to understand what love really means. It means knowing the “beauty and dignity” inherent in being with the person you love most in the world as they take their last breath. When circumstances do not allow us to be physically present at that time, when someone or something else takes that life away or we are far away, The Dance takes place in different ways and different forms. I do believe that the love inside of you not only goes with you, it also goes with the one we love.

Stat of the Day: Men get breast cancer too, but only 1% of breast cancer is in men. The rate has grown since 1975 from 1 per 100,000 to 1.2 per 100,000. Growth is attributed mainly to early detection.

Task of the Day: Say I love you to the person(s) you love most in the world at least three times today and every day: In the morning, in the evening and at bed time.

Resource of the Day: I found a song about “What Love Really Means” Check it out I enjoyed it and I think you will too.

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Our Essence Becomes Entwined

NATIONAL FAMILY CAREGIVERS MONTH 2017

Breast Cancer Awareness Month Blog: Day 24 B'shert

WHAT LOVE DOESN'T REALLY MEAN

What I Need to Know

Welcome to October Breast Cancer Awareness Month -- Day 28

Welcome to October Breast Cancer Awareness Month --- Day 29

Sam Simon

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FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE ACTUAL DANCE
Contact Samuel A. Simon for information and media inquiries:
sam@theactualdance.com • 202-329-1851 (mobile)
www.TheActualDance.com

Our Essence Becomes Entwined

NATIONAL FAMILY CAREGIVERS MONTH 2017

Breast Cancer Awareness Month Blog: Day 24 B'shert

WHAT LOVE DOESN'T REALLY MEAN

What I Need to Know

Welcome to October Breast Cancer Awareness Month -- Day 28

Welcome to October Breast Cancer Awareness Month --- Day 29

Sam Simon

Archives

Categories

Archives

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE ACTUAL DANCEContact Samuel A. Simon for information and media inquiries:sam@theactualdance.com • 202-329-1851 (mobile)www.TheActualDance.com

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE ACTUAL DANCE
Contact Samuel A. Simon for information and media inquiries:
sam@theactualdance.com • 202-329-1851 (mobile)
www.TheActualDance.com