A reader applauds Matt’s message of love but wonders whether it’s possible to love an individual who is “unlovable,” or if we ourselves can be loved, even if we’re not particularly lovable.
Matt responds:
We can definitely be loved if we’re not lovable, because love is in the eye of the beholder. How can you love an egotistical ass, a drug addict, a falling-down drunk? How can you love somebody who might have beaten the shit out of you ten years ago, someone who betrays you, someone who lies to you?
That’s why tolerance, forgiveness, and all the higher aspects of the human condition are so hard to achieve. I personally find it very difficult to achieve. Simone Nathan, the first person to talk to me about my art, always said I was a good dose of General George S. Patton and another good dose of Mother Theresa. It just depends on which one showed up on any given day. "Hug ‘em and tell ‘em we love ‘em," or "Cut off their damn heads and shoot ‘em in the stomach as they’re going down"? Which Lamb showed up today?
I have conflicting notions of myself. I absolutely know that I’m a paradox. That’s why the entrance into the world of art and the spirit calms me, guides me, directs me, and brings me to a much saner world than the one we live in.
Man’s inhumanity to man haunts me. How can we go and throw people into the ovens in death camps, then go home and pray to God and eat a family picnic, then go back to work and kill people all week? How can we be nice people and monsters at the same time?
I’ve come to the conclusion that the human species is a very difficult creature, and until we teach other to forget about our inconsistencies, to accept one another as we are, and not as we want them to be—until we realize we are not the center of everybody else’s universe, that we are only the center of our own universe, then we will not reach our full potential as a species.
For me, my universe is centered on being the best Matt Lamb I can possibly be: not a saint, not a devil, just Matt Lamb, whoever the hell that is.
So it’s an evolving, exciting, daunting, and scary message. We don’t have any excuses about who we are. There’s no “Look what they did to me!”... it’s “Look what I did to myself.” It’s like gettting on top of an 80-story building thinking you can fly, and thinking, by the time you get to the 40th floor, “Maybe I screwed up.”
Knowing yourself is probably next to impossible, but not knowing yourself is probably a big mistake. My belief is that absolutely you can be loved, no matter who you are, because you don’t know whether you’re lovable or not.
The one thing you absolutely must do, without fail, is to love yourself. Because if you can’t love yourself, you can’t love anybody else. If you look at yourself and you don’t like what you see, it might be prudent to change. If you don’t, then that’s what I put under the chapter entitled “Stupidity.”
Matt