When I was 21, I stood on a stage at the Royal Oak Comedy Castle. It was my first time at an open-mic. Just before my cue to go on, I remember having an urge to run out the back door. I was frantically pacing back and forth in the back hallway. I thought I could just bolt out there and cry and I wouldn’t have to do this. But that didn’t happen, right when my stress levels were peaking to the point I thought I was about to pass out, I heard my name called. There was an instinctive response to hearing my name — I felt summoned, so I just walked out there into the bright light, took a breath, and started talking. It was a blur and a total out of body experience as I went through bits of things I thought were funny when I was young and 21. People were laughing, and it felt amazing to be sending words and ideas out into the world and getting that energy right back.
At the end of my set I got into this idea I had about love. I started telling a story about after eating a very potent marijuana-packed brownie and having an epiphany (or more accurately, a panic attack in my bathroom) I started thinking about love and how it has such a powerful purpose. With rosy optimism gleaming from my eyes, I preached about how love is really the most purposeful thing humans could do. Because when two people are in love, they can stand as an inspiring example of love, and those people can have children and teach their kids to love. And if humanity continues along, being examples and teaching others and their offspring to love, love will continue to spread at an exponential rate, and one day the whole world would know love and love will reign supreme over hate conquering all... The bit steered into how I was explaining this big lofty idea to my brother and the punch line was about how he could absolutely care less. It got a great laugh because it was a call back to an earlier joke in the set. I think it also showed the audience that I had a heart. I could feel the room really listening, perhaps something about love connects to people very deeply, and although you had to be there to feel the authentic energy from the laugh — the point of this story is to explain when I started to really think about the word love and began feeling compelled to talk about it. For the record, that story stands as the last time I ever consumed anything with marijuana, yet it sparked an idea I’ve been experimenting with ever since.
I wanted to talk about love because there was something about it that made a ton of sense, but also another part of it that felt void of meaning and understanding. Right around that time in my life, I was in a low place over a situation where a girl I cared deeply for chose to make her life plans with a friend of mine. In some ways, love seemed to cause me much pain and suffering, in other ways, it was a superpower every human carried within themselves and the key to human evolution - the magic ingredient to a utopia of peace on earth. In that moment of what I felt was an epiphany, it felt like I had heard the word love so many times in so many contexts that there must be something compelling about it. The emotion felt massive, it shook me. It was as if every known song lyric, script line, idiom or parable about love flashed through my head in an instant. My mind felt like it was traveling warp speed conjuring up thoughts and vivid images of cliche quotes, corny engraved decor, or little paper tags teabags that mentioned love in some way. It felt like a stream of scattered signs and noise channeling a million voices at once. There was something purposeful that I couldn’t quite articulate or understand yet. And I’m still scratching at it here and now.
Looking back, I can see clearly that I had found a way to combine the ideas of romantic “love” and another form or concept of love. I was also looking at them as inseparable ideas. Tying them together in a way that people may have felt on an emotional level, but also lacked insight and the gravity of truth. I realize this was a flaw because it implied that you must obtain or find a romantic partnership in order to achieve this type of purposeful love. The way I see it now, that’s simply false. That other concept of love, the only type of love that is of any real impact to all human beings, is something that lies within, it is the type of love that can be given and channeled at any moment. It’s a constant choice we can make, a behavior we can learn and become better at.
What I’ve come to realize and narrow in on is that there is a curious misunderstanding and a problem with the way our culture uses and understands the word love. Mostly that problem arises from when people intertwine and confuse the ideas of love, the all-encompassing virtue and force of human good, with love as a romantic feeling or a form of romantic partnership.
Beyond those two concepts it has many other meanings and uses as well. The word love — it’s just so damn lovable. It rolls right off our tongues — such a lovely way to add flavor to our dialogue. To emphasize how much we enjoy or appreciate things: you could say, ‘I love ice cream.’ or lay into it with some extra loving with something like, ‘I looooove White Chocolate Raspberry Truffle ice cream from Haagen Daz.’ In some romantic ways, we’re looking for love. We chase our passions and do what we love. We fall in love. We make love. We get stuck in love. We play the game of love. We go crazy in love. When we go to McDonald’s “We’re lovin’ it.” We drive a Subaru, it’s “Love.” When life is good, we say we’re loving life! If we are lucky, we find and marry the love of our life. When we’re lonely, our love life doesn’t exist. The Beatles sang, “Love, love, love — love is all you need.” Human Rights touts, “Love is Love.” And in tennis, love means nothing.
I get all of it. And if you speak English, you certainly will too. But is all this scattered semantics helpful for encouraging humans to practice the meaningful value of love in our everyday life? Shouldn’t that be the goal? Let’s just set a hypothetical mission for human beings and say it’s total love and peace on earth… if the very word we use to describe the goal of the human species has its meanings and uses smashed up in a pop-culture meatgrinder and tossed about every which way from careless tongues to suit each’s own passing whim and desire, and then furthermore spread out thin in a smorgasbord of cliche and hollow sayings, how the heck does love, the love that means anything, even have a chance?
If more people had a better awareness and understanding about what they mean when they use the word love, this awareness can lead to better decisions when it comes to love. When Burt Bacharach sings, “What the world needs now is love sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.” Is he talking about romance? Did Burt perhaps pull this beautiful inspiration from his internal sadness from sensing a shortage of romantic relationships? Was the population not growing fast enough? Or what about when the Black Eyed Peas ask, “Where is the love?” Are they talking about that exciting yet fleeting warm and fuzzy spark-flying feeling of meeting a new partner? Is it about the hot rush of trying to hunt down a summer fling on Bumble? From what I understand in my human heart, I don’t think either of these has anything to do with romance or dating.
Collectively, by using love the way we do, we blur our view from its most impactful meaning. I strongly believe it would benefit everyone’s life decisions if we had sharper language to understand love. Just like Carl Sagan explained the concepts of god from the ideas of Einstein or Baruch Spinoza... “When you say god? What do you mean?” He once asked in return to an audience member who questioned whether or not he believed. The same goes for love. I often have heard the question tossed about in a lofty romantic context, “Do you believe in love?” or “Does true love exist?” I think you need to start with, “When you say love? What do you mean?” And having that understanding of what love is, or which concept we are searching for becomes very important and self-guiding. It’s an idea that will allow more coherent decisions, a happier you, and happier others too. So when we put love as our value in our life’s Bento box, we know exactly what we’re working towards.
If we weren’t wasting so much effort, energy and time looking for serendipity, romance and the perfect partnerships, we could focus more on learning to love and evolving to become more loving beings. That is a type of love that can benefit all of humanity, beyond a partner or immediate family. Within everyone there is an abundant resource of love, most of its potential goes untapped throughout life.
So what is love? Baby, don’t hurt me.
The love that really matters. The definition that has any really meaningful impact on our world is not romantic love. It’s not erotic love. And it’s not restricted to family love. It’s not the love we use to describe how we feel about IKEA furniture or the button we push on Facebook to give props to the lady who grew a vivacious zucchini. It’s love as, I like to say, the all-encompassing virtue of human good. Love as a selfless behavior, an act, an energy, a form of kindness. Love as a guiding star to our human potential to help us find harmony with our cosmos and existence. Erich Fromm, the social psychologist and author of The Art of Loving written in 1956 defines this type of purposeful love as a practice. When referring to love thus forward this is what I mean.
My love story.
In my teens and early 20’s, I was confused about the word love. I was also unaware that there was anything confusing about it. It was supposed to be something I fell into and I was supposed to find a girl who would fall for me too. It was just supposed to happen. I had lofty expectations, I imagined someone to go on dates with, hold hands, share similar interests with, laugh with, cuddle, and watch movies with. It had something to do with sex too. My idea was that when you were in this magical state of affairs with someone you get to have sex too. Hooray for sex! Plus all the glorious self-esteem and status-raising envy you’d achieve from amongst your friends.
I wondered how I was supposed to know when this triumphant situation would arrive, would it happen after the sex? Does sex confirm “love?” Was it when you liked someone so much that you wished that your own children could be half as smart and as beautiful as them? My infatuations, at times lustful and more often hopelessly poetic — could they be “love?” Maybe I’d know I was “in love” when I’d get jealous when she was interested or pursued by other men. My jealousy or emotional pain could be a sign I cared. If I cared a lot, does that mean I’m “in love?” Does my true “love” hurt the most? Would “love” reveal itself when the person I desired didn’t want me or didn’t seem to care? Is that pain a sign of “love?” And since my misconceptions lead me to believe that my purpose is to find love, should I pursue this rejection even more? I wondered which misguiding cliche should make sense for each instance of my experiments with various relationships. Sometimes it was, “You can’t hurry love” other times, “You need to go after what you love.”
I’d listen to music and try and decipher the cryptic meanings of the lyrics, gathering bad relationship advice about cruel romantic games or songs about sexual conquest. Taylor Swift has a few awful songs that make great examples of this. Like her lyrics in Blank Space, “Love’s a game, want to play?” or “Boys only want love if it’s torture.” Rom-com movies also provide a glutton of false inspiration from love stories that always seem to work out too. I’d listen and watch for ways to understand and relate the parallels in the films to my own life and romantic interests.
Getting drunk never made any of this confusion clearer. It enhanced the weak-minded decisions and led to a domino rally of social blunders. There was an age and a time that I used to “love” getting drunk, keeping up with the crowd I “loved” being around. Putting the short-term thinking and carefree captain at the helm. Heading out to bars, thinking this was how I’d find a meaningful connection, with perhaps another weak-minded and numbed up soul, staggering along looking to make a mutual mistake driven by a meaningless desire. Looking back it’s such a shamefully foolish way to spend an evening — mentally and physically wreaking nothing but havoc on myself. While I’m not one to bash myself down a rabbit-hole of regret or run the blame on old friends, and I will admit there were years of bonds, laughs, and memories to cherish for a lifetime — yet I still wish to inspire others to be brighter and take a better path.
In my quests for romance and requited feelings of interest, I’ve come across heaps of emotional peaks and troughs. There is joy in the success of connecting, flirting, dating, texting, calling, and all that yadda-yadda-yadda la-dee-da — but when the communication halts and the connection breaks down, when all the positive feelings start to slip away. Or after years of a routine growing a relationship and then severing off to go separate ways, I find this to be a darker and heavier place to be. Some people might say, you’re still in “love.” Stuck in “love.” Madly in “love.” But I think that’s a shallow and dull way to describe it. If you are emotionally in pain, hooked and spiraling in a rut of thought that drags you around your days over a failed connection or relationship. Thinking, “Why didn’t they want me? Why didn’t they call me back? Why do I keep thinking about them? Why did they abandon me?” Or perhaps burning with envy and illusions of that person erotically engaging with another. Tormenting yourself with your own illustrious imagination, turning this powerful tool designed to create and dream into a destructive force inside your own head. You may be, like myself once was, misguided to think this is any form of meaningful love. And you are misguided to think that you are failing at your life’s purpose. Love is never a lost cause. Although, this romantic heartbreak indeed hurts, when you pick yourself back up from the floor, when you give yourself time to strengthen through the process of change, you’ll be guiding yourself towards love you can give, not the romance you can slip and fall into, the love you can practice and learn and grow.
I’ve been there, rushing out to try and find another to fill the void, the urge, the need to suppress the anxiety of loneliness, the need to acquire a mate and conform to a social standard, to meet the satisfaction from a parental figure. Or expectations from family members asking at the gatherings, “When ya gonna find a nice girl and get marrrrried???” Or maybe it’s friends jabbing at your masculinity, wondering when was the last time you got laid. If that is a goal in your life, start asking yourself why. I think the kids actually say, “Slaying bitches” these days. It was once a game to go out and try and get lucky. I had this unhealthy and senseless aim for some time. Trying to use sexual conquests as a way to forget about women who didn’t choose me. Using them to boost my sense of self, collecting them as stories to share and fill the bucket of my personal pride. The older I get, I realize sex is really just for making babies. The pleasure and excitement of it is simply nature’s sweet trap to get us all to keep reproducing.
This game to go out and get laid, this is the desire of a drunken and misguided mind. Chasing highs and lows from the successes of sexual intimacy is very similar to the rush from the ups and downs you obtain from drug abuse. We chase, pursue, and unfortunately even find romance for so many misguided reasons. And when these hot sexual romances turn into routines of drunken hook-ups, late-night text, and regrets of making the same mistake with the same person who you know is not a partnership that will contribute to your life’s goals and commit to a lifelong practice of love these become cycles of a bad habit.
And I find the sentiment echoed in the Kesha song, “Your love is my drug” or Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to love.” But they’re not talking about the love that matters — they’re talking about a shitty pit of bad romance. (And speaking of Bad Romance, that’s a great Lady Gaga song.) Side note: have you heard her new one? Stupid Love, if that doesn’t get you dancing you’re a piece of lumber... But what does any of this have to do with the other stuff I hear about Love? That it’s the answer. That it’s all you need. That love is patient, that it’s kind. That we’re supposed to love one another. At the root, we may have a void, loneliness, or anxiety, a feeling of incompleteness and we try to fill it with romance. But the truth and the strength is realized when you become aware that you are a total and complete being already. There is no reason to go out and search for another half, you are whole with a whole lot of love to give. Life becomes a different game, and everybody can win. Sure, you can win at romance, or someone might be able to beat you at capturing or attracting a mate. It happens and losing stinks when it’s what you want, but the love that matters isn’t a love you can win and the good news is that you can’t lose it either. It’s an everyday practice.
I certainly don’t want to imply that any of this is easy.
I still struggle to change my mind and manage the way I feel. Trying to move past my past “loves.” Thinking about it depletes my energy and self-esteem. Chasing the thoughts of the ones who didn’t work out, or didn’t pick me seems to provide nothing but a waste of my valuable time. When I get trapped in it, I feel like I’m caught up in that unhealthy pattern of addiction. Somedays these thoughts occur so frequently, and they can hold my mind for such long periods away from the present — I don’t like it and I’ve worked to have a more balanced mind and observe these thoughts. If you’re dealing with the same I can highly suggest meditation, by practicing the daily ritual to simply watch and release thoughts, I continue to find new ways to manage and keep a healthy head. Or at least stay as sane as I can.
A guide to purposeful love.
If you see romance as “love” and that “love” as purpose, instead of love (as a behavior) as the purpose, then you confuse feelings of desire with your purpose. As an example, in the movie Hitch, at the end of the film, Will Smith’s character starts spilling out his feelings to Eva Mendes’ character. He runs after her car — even gets hit by her car, causing a dramatic final scene because he feels as if he’s chasing his purpose. When he picks himself up off the pavement, he delivers romantic lines about his passion for her, proclaiming in quintessential Big-Screen-Big-Willy-Style, “That’s what people in love do.” It feels so profound, and if you’re a human-like me you might get a little watery-eyed and joyful inside. Will Smith really puts his all into it. And while it’s cute and heartwarming, it’s a big steamy pile of Hollywood B.S. That’s because he's successfully pursued this woman to embark on the agreements of a romantic relationship based on his feelings. His character does not acknowledge that these feelings he is having will fade — just like the willowing beauty of a flower. Strains and stress and tensions will arise within the relationship. They will rack up crimes against each other and they will age, their heat of attraction will fade and subside. They will be tempted and intrigued by other mates. It’s not that love is going away. It’s that passion, romance, and attraction will dip and rise and change and evolve. Love, the behavior, the ability to practice the value of human kindness, is something that can exist whenever we have the presence of mind to bring it to the world around us. It’s the choice and the skill we can learn to show good to others, regardless of how bad we want to have sex with them. So while it’s less romantic and would make for a starkly different movie scene, starting his relationship with an agreement to practice and work at love would be a much better idea for the long run.
I believe this idea shift is a key starting to point to kickstarting love as a behavior on a more universal scale. We need to start changing the way we view romance as the most purposeful thing in our lives to achieve. It seems to me that I wasn’t alone in my misguided ideas and that many people confuse their ideas of life’s purpose with romantic quests rather than meaningful love. When the topic of love comes up instead of seeing it as a lifetime’s worth of energy given outward, people inevitably refer to their heartbreaks, their romances, or marriages. We need a new collective mission to steer people towards meaningful love. Why? Because it’s the only love that has the power to change the world.
When we see love as something we need to find, it creates a mindset that love is scarce or rare. This comes with anxiety, a panic-shopping mentality to compete for romance, capture it, and hoard it within a relationship with another partner. The clocks are ticking. So we rush to find it. Claim it. Marry it. Make it ours. Relationships, true commitments, partnerships, friendships, those certainly are rare. And they ought to be cherished and celebrated. But love as the value of human kindness is abundant and infinitely renewable if we allow it to flow from within ourselves.. So why not be relentless in the way we share it? It can be an endless fountain so long as we all say yes and agree to provide it for others.
Furthermore, the romance between two people isn’t where love should be limited. That love and commitment to be good, true, show honor and respect is something that all human beings should work and practice to share with all. Love makes its biggest impact when we commit and share it with our entire cosmos, including the being we call our own.
History of Love.
When you understand the concepts of love it can be a helpful guide. I’m not saying that having romance as one of your life’s purposes can’t make for a worthwhile endeavor, romance brings many people cherished memories, high esteem, and richness to their life’s journey, I’m just saying it’s very different from what I understand to be meaningful love. Love that has the power to help our species transcend and evolve. The force of good on Earth that has allowed our civilization to thrive and a necessity to help us continue forward.
This misnomer of love goes way back in human history, in ancient Greece, love was defined in a handful of concepts: you had Eros (romantic or passionate love) Philia (which deals with friendships, bonds, and relationships built on loyalty, trust and respect) Storge (the natural affection felt between family or offspring) Xenia (not really sure what this is about, but something to do with ancient Greek hospitality) and lastly, Agape (the highest virtuous form of love, pure, divine love for all.) This is the love I’m talking about. Language and the humans who speak it are both constantly evolving, as we grow our consciousness and rise to shift our behavior towards love, we’ll need to upgrade and evolve how we describe this behavior. Everyone has the capacity to love all beings, now we need to learn how to teach it and share it with everyone. One way to start is by reserving the word for a single and more universally understood meaning.
Rather than using love as an umbrella term, all of these concepts could be more accurately described using language we already have. And the biggest mental pickle of them all comes from when we use the ideas of Agape to mean feelings of Eros. Maybe it’s in our eager drives to embellish and exaggerate our feelings of passion, it’s the red hot desire and sheer mania of attraction that pushes us to speak of our romantic feelings in the highest, purest forms of love and the pinnacle of known expression. When we’re in eros, the height of romance we just want to shout it out from mountaintops and jump on Oprah’s couch. I get it. It’s exciting. So often what words cannot describe, we resort to using love.
The feeling of romance, as powerful as it is, can make us feel that this object of desire, this whirlwind situation is the most purposeful thing of our lifetime. We claim it must be destiny, even believing our romances are of divine intervention or fate.
Love misunderstood.
Of course, it’s very common in English that we use the same words in different ways, like the word light. You know if I say, “This suitcase is light.” I’m not saying that this suitcase is a beam of particles illuminating the world around me. You quickly understand that the suitcase is easy to pick up and not heavy. And if I were to say. “Wow. It’s light outside.” You know because of the context that I’m not talking about how I just went and hauled the visible atmosphere around and thought to myself, ‘that was a rather mild bit of effort.” But when it comes to love there’s a muddy difference. It’s meanings and uses seem to blur and when we aren’t aware of these differences, when we don’t have distinct and clear ideas it can cause problems. And with love, the stakes are arguably a bit higher. Because the way we understand love can steer our behavior, our purpose, and our long term decisions. Some of the biggest decisions we’ll make in our entire lifetime.
Let’s say you are on a quest to find a partner to love and be loved. You’re thinking, since love is the answer, a basic need, and it’s my purpose… and by golly I’ll do whatever it takes! Well then perhaps you might trip yourself up into a romantic hot and heavy hanky panky tizzy, get your mind all up in a whirl and think, here I am, “At last! My love has come along!” This is great. Yes, so sweet. Sex and hot make-out sessions. Life is good and I’m loving every bit of love! Well, you’ve got yourself set up for disappointment and a hard lesson to learn down the road. Because what you’ve found is romance, and you're failing to see the daily practice and commitment of love.
Not understanding the semantics can mislead. It’s like if someone were to say to you when you are young, “follow your dreams.” Let’s say you dreamt about an ex-partner, a lemon pound cake and her dog. This doesn’t mean that you should wake up and call your ex-girlfriend out of the blue wazoo and tell her that you have arrived on her doorstep with a tasty lemon pound cake — and that you’d like to feed it to her dog. Following your dreams does not mean, trying to reenact or will into reality the illogical spasms of thought and images that happen during REM sleep. It means go after your passions and your true values. When the Beatles say, “Love is all you need.” They’re not talking about you needing a fellow human to have sex with. But unfortunately some people, and I would argue most people, would really think romance is all they need. And when it fades, they aren’t quite sure what to do next.
Love: the solution.
It’s not going to be this blog alone or a single book, it’s not going to just be me. It’s going to take a cultural seismic shift in how we use the word. As Yancey Strickler writes in This Could Be Our Future, it takes about 30 years for the fruits of an idea to make it into the world. So maybe we can start sharing this idea around. Maybe we can influence a copywriter to use ‘enjoy’ instead of love. Or encourage a screenwriter to use ‘romance’ and depict the difference to educate an audience. Or maybe it’s just an average Jane to say love when she really knows what she’s talking about. If we can understand and collectively agree on the meaning behind love we can have a better awareness of how that behavior can manifest in all of our lives. Imagine if the whole world could be aligned on what it means, could we love a little more?
The concept of love that stands as a virtue, value and all-encompassing idea of human good and kindness. The love that pushes us to be better human beings. It’s the idea that made Jesus Christ of Nazareth famous and popular on the Earth for nearly 2,000 years. There are many others since then. I’m just trying to clarify it. I’m trying to inspire other people to see the concepts and use the word love accordingly. Because when you know the definition, you might be more inclined to let it be the right guide in your life.
A better future requires a handful of things. Brighter visions for humanity, sustainability for our people and planet and a more loving society. But what does it mean to love? If I were to ask you to define love, what would you say? Whatever it is you come up with, do you think your definition of love would align and be consistent with the rest of the world? It seems with love we are all a bit inconsistent. Some people might think about love as a feeling, some might steer the conversation about romance or relationships in their life and others might see it as something more as an energy, an act, a practice and a force of good.
If we are to achieve more love in our world, I see the first step as becoming aligned on what it means.
One thing I know about love, is that it’s a word. A four letter word. Made up of the symbols, “L,O,V,E”. That’s at least something we can all agree on. It’s a word used in many different ways. And in some instances it may not be an issue. It’s simply semantics and we use words to work as we see fit. And even children know the difference from when we say, “I love ice cream.” and “I love mom.”
But it’s not always that clear, and there is conflict and confusion that arises as love is used in the context of romantic desires, feelings and emotions as well as the meaning of love which is reserved for a virtue, a behavior, an act, a form of positive human connection. I have observed many people who have make misguided life decisions based on their confused “feelings of love.”
These problems arise when we think love is something we need to find. Heck we even think it’s something that’s in the air! It’s something that happens. It’s something we fall into. It’s something we get madly stuck in. Or when we set our purpose to search for it in another partner. Or if we’re in a romantic relationship and we’re trying to measure our emotional desire or attraction and wondering whether or not we “love” that person. But if you understand love to be a virtue, then you could realize that you don’t even need romance. With a new frame of mind about love it opens up new opportunities and routes to happiness.
Making matters more trivial, love & sexual intimacy are placed within the same category as one of Maslow's basic human needs. Does this idea put into the minds of people who see love as a romantic feeling that they need to find a partner to feel complete and happy? I would say it certainly does. But this love of a basic need, is not the idea of romantic “love”. The love of basic human necessity is love as an energy, a behavior, a practice, an action, a form and all-encompassing virtue of positive human connection and can exist without the presence of a romantic relationship. It’s something that everyone has within to give and receive.
The ideas of love as a virtue need to segmented away from the ideas of sex. It needs to be explained, rebranded, reimagined and reconsidered on a deeper and more conscious level. Maybe it even needs a new word. How about “Shoop”? Let’s give them something to talk about, how about “Shoop!” Maybe we get someone to start a brand around it, just like Gwyneth’s Goop. it could be the first new word of a new universal language for all of the people of earth. An earth language, how do we not have one by now? I don’t know, but it could certainly start with one word. And that one word should definitely be love. And imagine if the whole world came together to vote and invent one word and agree on what it meant. Next, we’ll work on the new love emoji.
Speaking of emojis, it’s interesting to me that if you type in love to find an icon at The Noun Project, (a crowdsourced global visual language designed to unite humanity) you get lots of heart shapes. It’s a little vague, but it’s a start and I have no qualms with hearts…
Listen, I don’t care what we call it, I’ll be very diplomatic about that and let other people decide. What I know is that there is a concept of love that translates to a very important and underutilized human behavior, this love has the power to sustain humanity and improve our harmony of life, and we need to get on the same page about what it means.
Once we have a unified understanding of what love is, the next step is to teach it, inspire it, and create the awareness that love (or shoop) is a power and skill we all have with room to grow.
Because the second problem is that many assume we already know how to love. That our capacity to love is limited to a fixed mindset. But the truth is that the ability to love is one of which can be enabled and empowered through learning, practice, growth and experience.
Love has to be a practice or behavior we are constantly working at and growing. When it comes to love, we all need to keep learning. But how can we learn? Where does this source of loving wisdom come from? To me it’s as important as sustainability for our planet. Our human behavior is a constant crisis. Could love become a major area of study? Could companies seek to hire and employ a Chief Love Officer to infuse more positive loving behavior within their structure? While romance is frowned upon and shagging in the storage closets is strongly prohibited, the dynamics of corporate culture would most certainly benefit from efforts to infuse love from the top-down. Why aren’t we paying people to educate themselves and become love leaders and teachers in our world? Isn’t that a most-worthwhile and noble service?
When it comes to love, we need to agree, we need to learn, we need to practice and we need to keep on loving.
Love And
In the book Blink, Malcom Gladwell talks about improv comedy. He explains rather poetically the beauty of the craft and hones in on the key system, the governing law which makes improv possible. The simple rule is, “Yes and...” Yes and is the agreement between two improv performers, a commitment to always accept what another improviser makes up on the stage and then add something to it. If an improviser says to another, “Your feet! Your feet are sinking in tomato sauce!” You can’t say no they’re not. You’d say something like, “Help me, grab that giant spoon over there!” And then you’d also have a giant spoon in the scene!
Improv when it’s done well, in its beautiful free-flowing form, is allowed to function and play out because of its agreement from the get-go. It’s that simple rule of, “yes and.” It allows the players to understand each other and comply. I feel the same can be learned about love. Great relationships can flourish on a simple gem of a governing rule. Love and... Just like improv, love between all can start with a commitment to this idea. Love and… We give love, we agree to it, we acknowledge it and we return love. When the action is love, the reaction is love and the cycle continues. That sounds like a game I want to play every day. A world with love is a world I want to live in every day, a world where when we call love by its name, its true meaning is summoned. At the end of the day, it’s a little idea I find worthy of the spotlight.
Thanks for reading. No get out there and go love, if you know what I mean.