Repetition & Giving Love
I did an exercise called repetition in theater class today.
The instruction was simple: find a buddy, come up with a random sentence, and take turn repeating the same sentence to each other in different ways for 5 mintue.
Even though the instruciton was straightforward, the exercise itself felt impossible. During my initial attempt, my buddy and I exhausted every possible way one could say “You are really funny” in just about a minute.
The trick to this exercise involves being more intentional about your buddy’s emotion and less intentional about the ways one could say the same sentence. Once my focus shifted from ‘How can I vary my intonation’ to ‘What is my buddy trying to convery to me’, it became really natural to respond back and we managed to come up with a whole storyline.
This exercise reminds me of how we should give love.
I used to have this misconception that love in itself is enough, but I now think that there are right and wrong ways to give love. The right way to show love should be informed by how the other party wants to receive love and not how you want to receive love. The focus should be on the other person. Showering someone with love without understanding what they appreciate may actually hurt them.
On a tangential note, I think a good way to understand how one wants to receive love is by observing how one instinctively display love to others. I hypothesized that this to be exceptionally true for younger kids.