“What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant?”
Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic
I think we are not born knowing what we love or hate. We discover them in life; through observations, hearsay, experiences. We can also become conditioned to love or to hate, through our environment, the people we are close to. And so we have to remind ourselves often, that love is not a feeling; it is an action. It is a deliberate action to take towards the subject we’re loving or trying to love. It can be easier or harder depending on the subject, but it is not a mere feeling. It is something that can be cultivated.
Having set that in place, consider my previous blog post on letting love carry you. As a matter of fact, love is often the thing that carries us through the thick and thin, ups and down. It’s harder to go through volatility in your job when you don’t love it. And if you don’t love your friends, it’s going to be a lot harder to keep the relationship when they go through a wild time and they do things to you that you might not be pleased with.
So you can cultivate love, and love will take you through various circumstances. The implications are larger than you might think at this point. Because our whole life is a struggle and wrestle with circumstances; highs and lows from relationships, grades, achievements, instabilities, insecurities and all that. If we are able to learn to cultivate love for what we do, the people in our lives, then they will be taking us through those struggles, they’ll be wrestling with life together with us, rather than wrestling against us.
And as a bonus, we forget about the self.