This Is What I Discovered About Love This Year

We often talk about aspects of love when we say things like, “Love is kind, they did that for me because they love me, or even, if they loved me they wouldn’t… or shoudn’t…  do something.” We talk about love in terms of patience, generosity, support, commitment, quality time, and understanding as much as we label behaviors and traits that we believe aren’t loving.  Things like selfishness, dismissiveness, abrasiveness are commonly labeled as such.

This is what I discovered about love this year:

Love is so much more than any one aspect of it and so much more than the sum of all its parts.

It’s the life force that makes everything possible. And while those traits I mentioned are aspects of love, they aren’t synonyms for love. Love is ALL of these qualities and MORE, also existing in choices and decisions often perceived as unloving. 

Every year on my birthday I pick a word to center on throughout the year, last year it was love.  I spent the year noticing love, reflecting on love, getting curious about my own relationship with love and examining the impact of love in my life as well as the impact of love on others. 

When I noticed loving behavior like courtesy, kindness, attentiveness, comfort, even acts involving uncomfortable honesty and fierce boundary setting, either demonstrated by me or others, I watched the impact. I noticed what happened inside me when I practiced those qualities or was on the receiving end of actions that seemed to be motivated by those traits. 

The gentler expressions of love as you might imagine, left me with a felt sense of feeling seen, and valued. Acting in those ways toward others seemed to produce an inner calm, a quiet resonance. When those expressions were more fierce, more uncomfortable, I still witnessed and felt that quiet resonance underneath the discomfort.

As I continued to reflect on what I was noticing it seemed to me that those instances of loving action connected people to a knowing about love, almost like breadcrumbs  along a path. Reminders of the power of love whether gentle or fierce.

But when I reflected on love as an energy that contained all of those qualities and more and looked at the impact on my life, I became acutely aware that when people showed up embodying love, not just expressing it,  at various times in my life, it transformed me. It either changed the direction of my life, expanded my life exponentially or helped me discover myself on levels I know I wouldn’t have gone to, were it not for love inspiring me.

I discovered the practice of love is alchemical.

It made me think about a philosophical principle I read decades ago and wrestled with over many years before getting it, “what is TRULY loving for one in a situation is TRULY loving for all in that situation”. 

When I first encountered that principle, it seemed ridiculously privileged. I kept turning it over and over in my mind, continuing to come back to the word TRULY… I began to believe that word is the most important in this principle.

We can say all kinds of things are loving, they may even be a part of love, or we may have rationalized that they are, but that doesn’t mean those actions are TRULY loving. I think the alchemical aspect of TRULY loving is an energy that comes from a deep knowing that no matter how uncomfortable I am in this situation I will live into my values as deeply as I can for myself and for the others involved.

When we do that we are often asked to stretch in uncomfortable ways. Sometimes we’re asked to inconvenience ourselves repeatedly, sometimes it asks us to say hard truths and make hard choices.  Sometimes it means not saying what we really want to say or even saying something that we are uncomfortable saying, letting all the pieces of the puzzle go where they may.  That’s when the alchemy happens, that's when you truly see love as a force that can’t help but transform, regardless of our opinions about the transformation.

Discovering that this year and understanding more deeply the impact of love as the most powerful force there is, has opened me to release more, to trust more, and to notice more, especially when I want to turn away.  What a gift.  

This year, I'll uphold this new tradition, eager to see how these insights into love shape my outlook and deepen my grasp of my chosen word for the year: connection.