A newsletter arrived in my inbox with the subject “What Makes Life Worth Living?” But without reading its message, the question transformed to what do I live for and what should I live for?
The more I learn, the more I am convinced that I do not know what life really is. And what is more, everyone appears to be guessing at the meaning of life, too. The event called living is neither simple nor easy. That is, if one were not going through it constantly on automatic mode.
Should one be living for anything other than reciprocal relationships, fulfilling responsibilities, educative pleasures, and even sustaining solitude? Should the question, what do you live for? make one consider that uncomfortable and unanswerable question: why am I here? and lead one to meditate on, what should I live for?
Something tells me the right answer to the question comes to one after much contemplation. The answer yielded should be frightening and exciting, no? It should be something that connects the corporeal with the spiritual, the internal with the external. It ought to be a life’s work that would generate enriching difficulties and insightful growth, no? It should be something that ignites one’s life with harmony and help one meet death with very little regret.
So how about Love? And if you just scoffed and said love is never enough, ask yourself have you ever really loved anyone, even yourself? Remember that love means much more than romance and does not equate lust, infatuation or selfishness. By Love, I only mean the greatest gift of life. Love is life. So is one truly living if one is not even trying to decode love and participate in the art of life? Thus ignorant of the heart of life?
Some argue that love is for the weak. But tell me, have you ever tried extending love to someone that every fiber of your being wants to strangle? It is not even easy to love those we actually want to love. I won’t confess to you how many times I want to hurt––so badly––the people I claim to love because they are so infuriating! Love, dear friend, is a most difficult practice because it is the true language of life; the essence of life, but also a forgotten language. It is at once the oldest and the youngest form of life, the strongest, the most flexible and the most vulnerable thing. So isn’t it rather accurate that most people are too weak to practice love? I know I am. I have too many names in my little black book that I want to make voodoo dolls for and poke often in the eyes––if this sounds therapeutic to you, high-five!
I deduce that only a few people come to understand that love is the most powerful thing there is––Dante expressed it in the Divine Comedy; J.K Rowling expressed it in Harry Potter. But that love is life is a law present in everything and available for all hearts to recognize. Yet I know of only one person who practiced, successfully, true love. He was a super weird carpenter who went around saying things like if you are not without sin, throw the first stone. He even had questionable besties, one of whom was once a prostitute, you know. This dude knew beforehand which of his friends would betray him but did he drive them away? No. He went on his knees and washed their feet––he must have gone on his knees, how else does one wash stinky feet? He forgave betrayal––one of the biggest pains––even before it happened and didn’t even try to stop it. Now, tell me, when was the last time you loved like that? I never had and I probably would never be able to do so without some serious help. But won’t it be a most beautiful thing to live one’s life trying to achieve the ability to love self and neighbor in this vein?
Love is powerful because it is the foundation of everything great: faith, truth, duty, humility, beauty, loyalty, courage, empathy. Without love, virtues are just like priests “making love to” little boys.
To live to love is to kindle and grow a fire within one’s heart. A cleansing and enabling fire that joins one’s heart with the everlasting heart of life.
