After finishing The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, the works of Kierkegaard appealed to me once I learned that they had parellel themes of thought. Perhaps due to me being in a phase where I prepare for parenthood, I was drawn to Works of Love and have been deeply struck by the chapter "Our Duty to Love the People We See", where Kierkegaard describes it to be a discourse about "the duty to find in the world of actuality the people we can love in particular".

Throughout the discourse, although his confident style might come off as demanding, Kierkegaard gently invites us to love others by being sober in actuality instead of constantly seeking mirages. He constantly refers to a visual analogy about the wide-open eye that seeks for perfections in vain, in contrast to the closed eye of forbearance. The call, as he describes beautifully, is to "find actuality in this way with closed eyes (because in love you do indeed close them to weakness and frailty and imperfection), instead of failing to see actuality with wide-open eyes (yes, wide-open or staring like a sleepwalker's)."

This notion about "finding with closed eyes" could be pretty foreign to us goal-driven modern individuals. Yet, it is perhaps more intuitive if we compare two approaches to disciplining a child who, out of overbearing frustration, decides to shove onto the floor a set of cooked dishes for dinner. Consider if the mother decides to allow herself the eruptions of anger by yanking the child aside and screaming, "No dinner for you", then order him to quietly stand in the corner for three hours. Alternatively, suppose if the mother first decides to restrain herself, look the child in the eye and demand composedly for him to explain his actions, then mete out a consequence proper to his recent pattern of behaviour. It appears to me that the latter decision is harder, yet I would prefer it due to it's "coming closer" to the actuality of the child - his current failure in emotion regulation and his needs - and thus coming closer to loving the child as he is. Kierkegaard beautifully articulates: "To be able to love a person despite his weaknesses and defects and imperfections is still not perfect love, but rather this, to be able to find him lovable despite and with his weaknesses and defects and imperfections."

This gives intuitive guidance to what Kierkegaard means by loving the people we can love in particular with the closed eye of forbearance. However, it seems that Kierkegaard more strongly insists about the same error of loving mirages instead of loving actuality in our conception of love. To understand this, we need to take a step back from our previous discussion about how to love "the people we can love", to now discuss how to "find in the world of actuality the people we can love". Kierkegaard elaborates that "the task is not to find the lovable object, but the task is to find the once given or chosen object – lovable".

He gives the example of two artists, where one travels the world in vain search of a perfect face to paint, while the other does not actually profess to be an artist and has not found any face in the little circle of people closest to him "to be so insignificant or so faulted that I still could not discern a more beautiful side and discover something transfigured in it." Kierkegaard concludes that the latter would be the artist. Here we arrive at his thought that the people we can love in particular are given or chosen. To me, he is saying that the people we can love are (and will be) placed directly around us in our lives, and that we do not have to seek them out, but rather focus our efforts on how we can find and keep them lovable.

We started off this discussion with Kierkegaard's recommendation that it is best to love others "with the closed eye of forbearance and leniency," and in so doing we better appreciate the actuality of these persons - not as we wish they could be but as they are. We then took a step back to explore Kierkegaard's insistence that it is best to not seek out who to love, but to love the people who are already around us, and thus to better appreciate the actuality of the people placed around us.

At this point of my reading, I couldn't help but to take an even further step back and consider applying this idea of "loving the actual" to not just the people, but also every phenomenon that come upon us in each moment. This, to me, would fit in well with Dostoevsky's view about loving all things, as articulated by the Elder Zosima: "Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things." This would further echo Christian thoughts from Ignatius of Loyola about finding "God in all things", Taoist ideas from Chuang Tzu that the sage "at every encounter generates the season in his own heart", and Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh saying that "life is available only in the present moment".

In other words, my question is: are we invited to love the actual by choosing not to chase moments that we would like, but instead to find each once given and chosen moment – lovable?