What is Love?

Love is attention. End of.

The Greeks gave us three words. Eros, philia, agape. Plato called it a ladder to beauty. Aristotle called it the friendship of virtue. Augustine called it the will turned toward God. Fromm called it an art. Each of these is real. Each is also a description of what attention does once it is given, or where it goes, or how it shows up. None of them is the thing. They are dealing with the expressions of love, not love itself. Higher abstractions of an act that is, at the center, just attention.

Love shows in attention. With your children, do you play with them, draw with them, build with them, and more importantly, learn with them? With your partner, do you listen to them, notice when their hair style changes, notice what dress they were wearing this morning, know what is causing their consternation? With your work, do you wake up excited to engage with it, does your full attention go to it before anything asks for it? With a place, did you notice the trees losing and gaining their leaves, the mushrooms the day after a rainy night, the frogs in the stream, or the ethereal orange hue of the sun on a fresh morning?

What you pay attention to is what you love. There is nothing beyond it.

Yet there is no love. The children are ignored. The parents, who themselves were ignored and then did the ignoring, are now quarantined in forgotten corners. Every relationship loses meaning when seen through the lens of a person, that isolated, desperate identity asking: what do I get out of this, where do I fit, how does this serve me? All attention is paid inward. But there is nothing inside. All of love is wasted on a void, leaving a life void of love.