Daily Musing: On Love

Good Morning.

It’s a new day, a new week, a new arbitrary universal concept, but I’m still the same. Mostly.

With Callie’s return, I’ve been reminded of something that I forgot was as powerful as it truly is: love.

I’ve written before that time is the only truly valuable resource that a human being has. If you were to need to absolutely assign a numerical value to a human life, the best measure you could use would be time (for all that you love, please don’t use money). But we shouldn’t assign numerical values to human life when we can avoid it. We know how dehumanizing it is. Prisons? Nazi concentration camps? Minimum wage? Yeah, let’s knock that shit off.

But what we don’t use to value our lives, is love. We don’t measure it and use numbers to represent it. You can by looking at oxytocin levels in the brain, and I’m all in favor of science, but let’s not get caught up trying to turn this into an equation. We don’t need to, because love is something we’re all familiar with in one regard or another.

It’s something you feel, something you don’t quite understand, but critically important things happen because of love. Sure, you can go to work and exchange your time for money, then to a store where someone else is exchanging their time for money, and you can give your money to get a toy train, but what a long, over-complicated, inhuman mess that is. You could be a little more diligent about it, find someone local who makes the toy trains, and exchange your money for their train, but even then, why the need for money as a medium? Finally, (and I loathe bringing this up before December) but in about a months time is a well-known holiday, whose name I won’t write until after Thanksgiving (the best holiday, yeah I said it, and I’ll explain that in the future too). On this December holiday, you give the people you love the toy train, no money needed.

Because love isn’t a transaction. You don’t trade love for someone else’s time, you don’t trade love for money (love and sex are different, mind you). You contribute an equal amount of time with one or more other people, and love is the result.

Anyone who’s a parent will understand this equation. I only say equation because for a world obsessed with money it seems easier to think of things as math problems instead of human nature, after all there are almost five times more accountants in the US than mental health counselors, including behavioral disorder and substance abuse counselors (sources from Bureau of Labor Statistics; quick aside, discovering this was profoundly unfortunate).

Parents spend years with a child, before they have any indication of whether or not their love is requited. If you’re a parent, you’ve given someone years of your life, for free. I’ve seen parents talk, we’ve all heard the “oh it’s life changing”, “it’s more rewarding than I ever could have imagined”, “it gives you a whole new perspective on life”. These are life-changing opinions, and there was not a penny exchanged between the (typically) three parties involved (two parents and the child). However, there were millions of pennies exchanged between those parents and the hospital, because you can’t even get that life-changing love without spending absurd amounts of money.

We’ve done it. We’ve commodified love. It’s happened right under our noses and no one bats an eye. That’s how sick of a society we are. But that’s not what all this is about. This is about something that we don’t regularly measure or exchange our time for, that has a profound positive impact on our lives.

We spend time with our loved ones. “Spend time with”. Even that sounds transactional, “spending”, but we were spending time with loved ones thousands if not millions of years before we ever had an inkling of currency. If anything, we’ve adopted love language to fit financial terms to make it more approachable and acceptable. You spend time, you spend money, what’s the difference right? Life and death for some people. Think about that next time a loved one wants to spend a day together, but you’re at work.

You only get so much time alive. In the famous words of Kansas, “and all your money won’t another minute buy.” Yet we chose, are encouraged to, and are effectively forced to sell our lives. I think it used to be that communities were smaller, tighter-knit, and better known than they are today. I think perhaps, we did use to love our neighbors in a way we don’t today. I live in an apartment building with ten apartments, and I know one other family as friends, and one other tenant as passerby, and that’s it. If I spend an hour with every family in the building I’d need almost two “full-time” hour work days, but we all know relationships aren’t built in an hour.

Relationships aren’t even built over weeks, it takes a long time to have a meaningful relationship with someone. I’m not talking about romantic relationships, but personal relationships, friendships, even just a degree of understanding and social knowledge within a community.

We’ve become so distant from those around us. Our political system has divided people from the very beginning. Money divides people. Borders divide people. Why? What are the leaders, the voters, anyone who makes a decision, what are they missing? What don’t they know? Love.

You don’t have to love someone to respect them, but I think we tend to respect those that we love. We need to stop dividing people though, because that creates a situation where love is impossible. Most people are familiar with Romeo and Juliet, or Beauty and the Beast. In both stories, a desire for love, suppressed by fools (or one fool, looking at you Gaston), leads to death, suicide even (which I know I’ve written about before, it’s a profound subject).

I’m not telling you to love everyone, that’s unreasonable, unlikely, and everyone is literally impossible (you can’t spend even one second with every human alive within the course of your life). I’m not even telling you to love, because I think it’s wrong to tell people what to feel or what to do. I’m telling you that love is powerful, life-changing, and something that the world needs much, much more of. Burt Bacharach was right all along wasn’t he?

When you make use of your time to love, time feels so much more valuable, more meaningful, more worthwhile. That’s probably why people say the cliche, “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Love takes work though. Love takes time, time that we as a society just don’t have anymore due to the decades, if not centuries long abuse that the system has been putting us through. When you spend 40+ hours in a week selling your time to someone who doesn’t love you, you don’t have enough time, you don’t have the time you deserve as a human being, to share time with those that do love you.

We’ve had world leaders talk about family as being core to society, but then why do we expect people to leave their families for a third of their week? How can that possibly leave enough time for love and relationships to develop? It doesn’t, especially within broader communities. We can’t develop relationships with those around us, so we tend to not care very much what happens to other people. It’s a long, trickle-down effect of lack of love, compassion, and understanding.

I’m afraid people are forgetting to love. I’m afraid people don’t value love over their precious dollars. I’m afraid that there isn’t enough love in the world.

I love my friends. In a brotherly, familial way. We don’t say it often, but it’s true, and perhaps we should be more vocal about it (I literally just sent a message to my group chat).

I love my family. I know I don’t tell my parents enough, and I got to see one of my siblings this weekend and was sure to say it more than once.

I love my girlfriend, Callie, who sparked all of this thinking, after she single-handedly altered the physical aspects of my brain, inducing some of the better feelings that I’ve felt in a while, and inspiring some much needed positivity into my writing.

Nothing bad can come of love. Jealousy, or envy perhaps, but even envy tempered with understanding isn’t inherently evil, it’s just a desire for love expressed by someone who doesn’t have enough in their life.

Don’t be afraid to love. Don’t be afraid to express that love. Right now, go tell someone who you do, that you love them. It’s important, both for you to say, and for them to hear. Shout it on the streets. It’s important for the world to know that it’s okay to love, our world needs so much more of it.

And if there’s anyone out there who feels alone, who feels they don’t have someone to tell, and like they won’t hear it anytime soon: I love you.

I don’t know who you are, where you’re from, what you believe in, or what you’ve done in your life, but oftentimes, it’s just something we have to hear to start to believe.

I love you.