“They mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death,” Oscar Wilde.  I wrote about the importance of love in my gratitude a little over a week ago. The concept of love amazes me the more I look into it.  For a word we all know and apply to so many things on a daily basis, we really don’t know a lot about it.  We understand it conceptually—like we all know when we love something—but experientially it’s different to everyone.  Books on love language and the chemical traits of it and the science behind it the emotion of it flood the market and we study it all the time for different reasons, from different angles, and in so many different ways.  We’ve created holidays for it, we have cards for it, we buy each other gifts for it.  But when it comes down to it, no matter how we all feel it, none of us can really explain it.  Buddhism and other religions talk about love being the key to what makes the world go round.  Why is that?  My feelings have always been big—when I love, I LOVE, when I’m angry, I’m ANGRY, when something bothers me, I am BOTHERED big time.  I feel the emotion and then I let it pass.  Some stay longer than others but I never cling to it. Something about getting older and witnessing the fragility of life has shifted some perspective for me. I feel better when I’m sitting with that love state than I have previously—things seem easier. 

The ease I felt in that moment felt different than before and really got me thinking–and something clicked: this is what it means for things to flow in love state.  Love encompasses this understanding that allows things to be and moves them along as it should, it’s an acceptance of what is.  I’ve tried to articulate that understanding previously but it wasn’t quite what I wanted to say.  Flow is love, understanding is love, but more than that, acceptance is love.  That acceptance sends the vibration to the universe that we trust, that nothing needs to change, that we are aligned and with what we need in that moment.  Love isn’t necessarily blind acceptance because we often love things and that need some guidance, but love does provide those guiderails.  It is accepting the nature of what is and learning to work with it rather than force it to be what we want it to be.  Love isn’t a weapon or a tool, it is a way of being.  It’s in that way that we can truly experience love for all things and that is something we can only understand through experience.  Love also provides peace because we aren’t fighting against what is–love is life.  We are embraced in the moment, not trying to create anything else and presence is something we still undervalue in this society. We all want it, we all want presence and peace but we struggle to do what it takes to have those things—and all we have to do is understand what it actually means to love.   

I want to go a bit deeper into that meaning: I propose love is what keeps us from death BECAUSE it is what gives life meaning.  It is a marker of the soul and the human experience and perhaps it leaves a mark on the soul. When we ask how to be better and make things right, that all comes from how to love better.  Love creates connection and it is the connection we’re all looking for.  The human mind gets muddled up sometimes and we confuse what different chemicals in our body mean—lust v. love, anger v. fear, etc.  We don’t always understand the reality of what we’re feeling yet many people spend such an inordinate amount of time thinking of what’s next rather than being present with where we are now.  Instead of asking what happens tomorrow or even when this physical manifestation is gone, we can’t  forget the key how to live well right here and now.  And that is with love.  Let’s go back to that love state/flow and how when we are in a love state, things flow easily.  I’m the first to admit I’m not in that state every day.  Watch me when someone cuts me off while driving and you’ll see real quick that I am anything but accepting of that moment and love is far from the picture.  I try to remember as quickly as I can in those moments that whatever I’m feeling right then is an energy and it has an impact on what I receive from the universe.  If that’s true then that carries over into the every day life as well—what we feel can determine what we get.   

Love is an energy source—it carries a charge like anything else we do.  The emotion is a result of very specific chemical flow in our brains combined with an impulse.  While I wrote my section on gratitude for love, it hit me how many different kinds of love there are based on what we’re talking about.  The love we feel for a person isn’t the same as the love we feel for our favorite chair but we’re using the same word to describe it.  Sure, both provide some level of comfort and we’re saying it’s love, but that love is different—I wouldn’t die for my chair but I would for my child.  It’s different means to the same dopamine/oxytocin hit.  I love a simple answer to things and the chemical/electrical state of the brain creating a feeling makes the most sense.  When I witnessed my grandmother dying, she still said thing while unconscious/in a stupor.  I saw in that moment that we are a little more than a series of electrical impulses in a meat bag.  I’m not saying that disrespectfully—frankly I say it in awe.  Even as we shut down, our impulses still trigger and we have no conscious awareness of what we’re saying/experiencing but that is based on how we lived and what we believed, the input we gave our brains our entire lives.  On her death bed she said things like, “You better fix it or I’ll fix you!” and I immediately saw her when she was younger yelling at my mom and uncles that way.  So that led me to believe that we have control over how we view the world because that is how she viewed the world when she was alive and that was the message she shared with her kids—she believed that was how kids should be raised and it still fired through her brain at the end.  Fast forward to last weekend and that information combined with the feeling of flow made me understand how we very much have control over how we feel and our responses to the world.  Stay open, be curious, and learn to work with the true source—love.  We have a choice to see and experience the world any way we want so choose to see it in its highest possibility.