Simmons is a junior communications
major from Queens, New York.
This past weekend, Omega Phi Beta Sorority, Inc. hosted an event entitled Café Soleil, which gave students an opportunity to showcase their talents in various forms such as poetry, story and song. They also invited an accomplished poet, Jasmine Mans to perform her work on the DePauw stage.
This event that focused on transitive love caused me to reflect on the way in which college students have begun to love themselves in a manner that demonstrates less than we did as when we were young children. I remember the days where we would care freely run outside without any concern for the scrapes and bruises that would occur with every fall on the concrete.
But now we are so concerned with how great our washboard abs must look, forgetting the playground battle scars we once took so much pride in. We put ourselves through rigorous body changes because have allowed our love for carefree fun to change into planned out workout destruction. Our love for toy cars and G.I Joes have been replaced with real roaring engines and the desire to carry 9-millimeter handguns and AK 47s.
Transitive love is about how much we have changed in the way we have loved things. I believe that once we enter adolescence we lose the ability to lose innocence and all things that are innocent. Those small things that we found so entertaining, we see as stupid and struggle with understanding the beauty we once saw in the simple things. The most disturbing part about this aspect of transitive love is that we never have the ability to love that innocently again. We are so damaged by our later experiences that we shut off and grapple with more demons that remove our ability to full be compassionate, because essentially compassion and love are one in the same.
We need to teach children to never forget the unconditional love they had for their toys, and to not forget the way they embraced the playground scars because it will demonstrate in adulthood to love our bodies so we don’t want to morph them and to love people, because ultimately the human race could use more lovers.