What Would Love Do?

Life only makes sense to me when viewed in the context of love. Between work, chores, and an endless to-do list, I can start to feel like a “doing machine,” just waiting for a time when life will be more meaningful. When my heart is closed, all the mundane actions of daily life feel like a burden. But when I let myself be moved by love, I don’t need a peak experience to find meaning. When my heart opens, the meaning of life is obvious.

So here’s my practice: opening my heart in the moment, even if I don’t want to, even if I’m upset or busy or disappointed or lonely. Sometimes it hurts to open. When I feel resistance, it usually means there’s pain I don’t want to feel. But when I’m willing to open and feel it anyway, the knot in my chest releases and life feels beautiful again.

This is an intense practice. Life isn’t always fair, and none of us escapes having our heart broken. So many painful things have happened to so many good people that we each have reasons to shut down and become jaded about life.

But this is where we have a choice: We can either be “reasonable” and stay closed or we can open anyway. That’s when I ask myself, “What would love do?” Because love doesn’t need reasons to love. And choosing love in spite of our reasons not to works a kind of magic on our souls that makes us feel whole again.

When I ask myself "what would love do?", these are the answers I get:

* Love would tell the truth, no matter what.
* Love would dance with abandon, not caring how she looked.
* Love would sit with others’ pain, and let it crack open the protective shell around her heart.
* Love would risk rejection to say, “I love you, I like you, I want to be close to you.”
* Love would give up being “appropriate” in quest of her desires.
* Love would honor her heart, her body, her boundaries, and her time.
* Love would claim her big, bright wildness without apology.
* Love would sit in the fire of her fear, shame, and loss until she finally realized she had nothing to hide.