Theme
1:42am January 31, 2014

Ever since my latest mortality wake-up call I’ve been meaning to say this.

And now I’m realizing that I really should.

Whenever I have a close call, anything that reminds me of my own mortality, the worse the close call, the more forcefully I’m reminded: 

The only question that matters, at the end of the day, is have you loved enough, and have you acted on that love?

Everything else that people think they care about falls away in the face of that question.

And at the end of our lives, that’s the question that matters.  That’s the only question that matters.  That’s what you’ll be left with.  And all the other things you’ve done, all the things that have fed your ego at every turn, and justified its doings, all those things will be gone and you’ll be faced with that question.

And when you’re faced with that question, you won’t be able to run away anymore.  You won’t be able to twist words around so that your acts of hate  are actually acts of love.  You won’t be able to do that. 

I used to do that.  I used to do things based only in my anger at the world, and I thought that because I said I loved, then that was enough.  I used the fact that there is justified anger based in love, to claim all my anger was justified anger based in love.  I was wrong, and eventually I couldn’t live with myself anymore.  Not even with whole communities around me reinforcing that rage against the entire world.  

There is anger that’s justified, that’s based in love.  It’s generally temporary and situation-specific.   And it’s not ‘sticky’.  It doesn’t stick around and refuse to go away when the situation that called for it is over.  It doesn’t pop up over and over again when it’s not warranted.  It’s different.

And love isn’t the same as a fierce attachment to specific people, no matter how much I thought it was.  And it’s not the same as a feeling (although it can give you feelings), and it’s not the same as romance.

You can’t put love in words.  You can’t put boundaries around it and describe what it is and what it is not.  That’s simply not possible.  You can’t have an ideology of love.  You can only have love, or not have love.  That’s all.  It’s not even an emotion.

And there are people willing to see this.  There are lots of us out there.  There are lots of us who have had this kind of wake-up call often enough to understand the basics of what’s going on.  People can try to ignore us, they can misunderstand what we’re doing, they can denounce us.

But we’re always going to be around.  Because love calls us to it.

And there’s nothing wrong with you if love calls you to it.  There is nothing wrong.  There is nothing wrong even if people, or communities of people, treat you like you’re doing something horrible.  Because at the end of the day, everything else about the world will disappear and all you’ll be left with is “Did I love enough, did I love often enough, did I act upon that love often enough?”  And all those other things that you thought were more important, become so unimportant you will barely remember them.