JetUNsetter

I have recently been exposed to the wonders of babies. Among other extraordinary things about them, the predominant thing when spending time with newborns is the question what they need. Obviously they need the food. It does not end there though, they need a relatively warm and comfortable room to live in too. They also need safety so they can sleep. A lot of their development happens while they sleep in fact. Hence they sleep a lot. A lot!

So far so good. They are kept alive. But I don’t think it ends there. They need stimulation too. They tend to cry if understimulated. They make sounds they are bored and call the adults around them to entertain them.

Does not seem to end there either though. Even though we tend to think a dry, fed and played with baby that goes to sleep has all their needs covered. Baby doctors, in fact, won’t ask anything else. They only ask about sleep and diapers, weigh them and so be it.

There is this one thing though that clearly their bodies need, on top of food, rest and play: love. The more you caress a baby and fill it with love the brighter their eyes shine, their skin glows and most of the things that troubles them seem to go away.

This has been the most somatic demonstration of the need for love. Our bodies store love. We absorb it, we digest it and if we have had enough of it we can then give the excess back. I am sure that those in the psychiatrists and psychologists’ offices are people with bodies in love deficit. If only our bodies would come with a lovemeter and we could easily tell we are in deficit.

Like babies, the more love we get, the calmer we are, the more productive we are, the brighter we shine. And if our little bodies when babies are filled with love to a maximum perhaps we get into adulthood without a deficit in the first place. Adults in love deficit try to fill their gap in sex, saunas, massages, gyms and other somatic experiences that promise to repair what our bodies did not get when they should have: caresses, kisses and touches in our baby bodies from our parents and care givers.

I would assume this is the healing all the western self improvement literature is all about: self love. It is because we did not get enough early, we were not taught love, that we now need to be educated about it by a professional in later life and offer it to ourselves when it should have been offered to us back when we were learning anything else, how to walk, how to talk, how to use our hands and get food.

Someone once said to me it’s either diaper or food, when I asked why would a baby cry. Someone else though said that no matter the question the answer is love. Please help me make sense of this one to