All you need is love!
And Valentine’s Day is just around the corner…
Which means a complete extreme of emotions for different people: To some it is exhilarating and exciting, while others are already hiding in their makeshift lounge cushion forts and waiting till it goes away.
What does the idea of Valentine’s Day mean to you?
The first word we all think of is love, right? But how we think of that may differ. Valentine’s Day sells us the concept of Love as a feeling – an emotion that can be attracted with cute cards, cuddly toys, fragrant flowers and expensive meals.
WHAT DOES SCIENCE SAY?
I want to suggest to you that love is so much more than that. And at a time on the calendar when the scientific equation being flaunted to you is love = money spent + heart palpitation increase (or something like that!), how about we take a few minutes to look at love in a very different way.
I also want to look bigger than relationship love here – I want to talk about friendship; about the people you are classmates or colleagues with; about family and even about the people who serve you in the supermarket or who stand at the traffic lights asking for money.
LOVE IS A CHOICE
That phrase really does seem to threaten to remove all of the romance from it – as it should. But when you put love under the microscope and zoom in to its closest particles, that is what you will discover. Love is a choice.
More than just feeling the doof-dooof-doof of heartbeats when that special person is in the room and so being ready to do absolutely anything for them, true love is when there is no doof-doof-doof and you choose to act anyways.
Here is a list of ten creative and profound ways we can choose to love the people around us:
1. Listen without interrupting
2. Speak without accusing
3. Give without sparing
4. Answer without arguing
5. Share without pretending
6. Enjoy without complaint
7. Trust without wavering
8. Forgive without punishing
9. Promise without forgetting
10. Pray without ceasing
I found this list on the internet a long time ago and it caught my attention because it was so different to the usual ideas of what love is.
Yet when I looked closer I could easily see just how deeply each of those actions to be chosen and expressed could and would affect the people around me.
We could take time to unpack each of those, but rather look down the list and choose the one that you think needs the most work in your life and choose this week to focus on it. Maybe write it out and stick it on your mirror and choose one person specifically to test it out on. If you’re brave, maybe you’ll take one of these per week and live out ten weeks of chosen and expressed love. I imagine the effect on you and the people around you will be incredible.
How about you? Which is the one you would like someone in your life to be working on when it comes to you? Let us know in the comment section.