What Love Tells Me (2)

One day, Johnny was taking a walk with a friend when the friend suddenly asked, “What do you think love is?”

Coincidentally, Johnny had just written What Love Tells Me (1), so I summarized the latter part of that piece in reply.

But the friend wasn’t satisfied. “What you just said sounds like a description of love,” they pressed. “But what is love, really?”

Johnny was caught off guard and had to improvise. After a pause, I said,

“Love is seeing—it’s understanding.” Then I said, “Love is compassion.” And finally, I said “Love is sacrifice.”

I turned the question around and asked my friend what they thought. The friend, seemingly more rational,  responded,

“Love is a choice. Love is a commitment.”

Lately, Johnny has been talking a lot with friends about love.

Picking up from the last post: if love is so difficult, why do we still choose to love?

“Now your temperament carries the paths you've walked, the books you've read, and the people you’ve loved.”

Love fills us, rounds out who we are. Its effects can be irreplaceable—no book or path can quite compare. There are moments of quiet beauty in life when you suddenly realize: I act this way, think this way, even am this way—because of someone I once deeply loved.

Though time has passed and circumstances have changed, that person seems to live on in our soul. No matter what we go through, we can always honor the beauty of another life. And the goodness, the spirit we once encountered—will continue to be passed on through love.

As for the age-old question—What is the meaning of life?—someone once told Johnny, “The meaning of life is not about something; The meaning of life must be relational.”

That struck like lightning. Many of us have experienced lonely moments—feeling misunderstood, like every person is their own island. But in love, something breaks through. In love, lives are linked in ways never seen before. Isolation fades. Distance dissolves.

At a recent gathering, someone asked: “Do you think there is unconditional love?” One friend brought up a parent’s love. But even that—does it truly come without conditions? It remains open to debate. In Johnny’s heart, love lives across different scales of space and time. In many fleeting moments, I have felt immense goodwill from others, and felt myself thinking only of others. Like when people share joy, or knowledge, or experience. Like when hands reach out in crisis. That selfless love may “decay” with time, but its very presence seems to point back to something deeper—a source of love and goodness within human nature.

On the other hand, love wears many other faces too. There are those who once designed constitutions, perceiving deeply the human nature; those who built the orders and frameworks we live within. The architects of our material and spiritual worlds. Much of our lives, we owe to them. This rational and quiet form of love asks for nothing in return.

So—whether or not unconditional love exists in this world—we may still catch its shadow: pure, selfless, unconditional. Even if it doesn’t fully belong to this world, its light, from beyond, already shines into ours.

From the brokenness of this world,

we can sense what wholeness might be.

From all those we have loved, and all who have loved us,

we can glimpse the outline of a perfect lover.

From all the joyous, peaceful, warm moments in memory,

we catch a faint trace of a beautiful, eternal world beyond us.

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”