What is Love?

What is Love?

Dec 21, 2022 | Love

Sure, I know love. It is a feeling, right? Is it an action, too? Or is it a sequence of actions? Is it formulaic? When I read my last post on love, I am forcibly reminded that perhaps I do not know what love is it all.

Written by Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now is a song whose lyrics have always haunted me, this stanza in particular:

I’ve looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It’s love’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know love at all

As I try and unpack the above sentiment in my heart now that I am clearly past childhood (or am I?), I have a feeling that the way I have experienced love throughout my entire life has been remarkably selfish in some ways. I reduce love to (non)actions. I can do this, but I cannot do that, etc. What does that really mean? I do not know except in hypothetical scenarios that, well, are hypotheses on what I ‘might’ or ‘might not’ do in a given circumstance. Perhaps, however, I limit my life and those of others when I imagine what I either can or cannot do.
Heinz von Foerster developed an ethical imperative, which states: Act always so as to increase the total number of choices. I find this statement profound in many ways. When I look at the sum of my life and various specifics, I do not see I have embodied this principle very well, if at all. Recent events in my life actually call into question the extent to which this imperative currently serves as a guiding beacon in my relationships with others. I am obtuse. I am aloof, and I have discovered long-cycle patterns of behavior that take years to unfold. My discovery of these long-cycle patterns provide fuller context into my assertion that I am broken as a man. What is love? Unlike some in this world who cling to ‘absolute’ truth, I cannot definitively say one way or another. What I do feel, though, is that the quest to love others deeply has intrinsic value in ways that affect past, present, and future. Whose past? Whose present? Whose future? Nothing should ever be taken for granted.

About Spaciology

Spaciology is not abstract theory; rather, it is a practice you can feel.

  • Inside: Pause, breathe, notice.
  • Outside: Design rooms, rituals, and agendas that slow the spin and invite care.
  • Between us: Make dialogue a place where different truths can live together long enough to teach something.

Ultimately, leadership is the art of making space for what’s important (for everyone) and letting that clarity shape the next step. When we change the spaces from which we lead, our strategies change with them.

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Love(s)

Love(s)

May 29, 2021 | Love, Transformation, Truth

Love is something we discuss with others (or at least should). We point to it, demand and laud it. But what is it? Are all loves the same? When we teach our kids about love, we explain it in a way that encourages them to think on it as if it were a timeless sort of thing. It is exists as some sort of truth, as if any deviation from it represents a failure on their respective part. What if love is a construct? What if how we experience love results from cultural constructs that reinforce a worldview, a theory about human life? What if love is not a definitive thing at all, but rather itself a theory that frames our experience in a way that allows us to try and make sense of it? Are all loves the same? Do you love the same way now as you did 20 years ago? Is what you felt 20 years ago not love? In 20 years, what will you think about how you love now? Perhaps love is only defined in context and in relationship with others and, in turn, our very selves. Is love a verb? Is it a noun? Is it necessarily something we can satisfactorily describe in words to others? Is love the ability to answer the demands of others in the ways they say they need? What if we think their worldview is wrong? Is love the ability to do for others in the way they need even if it contradicts our own views? Is that love, or is that disturbing? Is your version of love better than mine? Can we both be correct? Do we love the same way and for the same reasons in all circumstances? Which kinds of loves matter? What if they all matter? Do all loves ask us to do the same thing(s). Love may indeed be real, but perhaps it exists in the plural, which may in fact call into question whether any of us exactly understand when another says, “I love you.”

About Spaciology

Spaciology is not abstract theory; rather, it is a practice you can feel.

  • Inside: Pause, breathe, notice.
  • Outside: Design rooms, rituals, and agendas that slow the spin and invite care.
  • Between us: Make dialogue a place where different truths can live together long enough to teach something.

Ultimately, leadership is the art of making space for what’s important (for everyone) and letting that clarity shape the next step. When we change the spaces from which we lead, our strategies change with them.

Spaciology Learning Commons

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The Hate

The Hate

Mar 17, 2019 | Love, Truth

It is so easy to lay blame, point fingers, puff up our chests and essentially ‘hate’ what is around us.

Society subtly encourages angry thinking in its creation of various competitive platforms whereby people are challenged not to look within, but destroy something outside themselves.

Our lawns must be greener than our neighbors, our houses must be taller or shinier, we must be impervious to aging and eradicate our wrinkles. We need to join the gym and sweat, fight, and otherwise stick up our proverbial middle finger at a universe that is watching our every move.

Turn on the TV lately? We have reality shows where we have the unique opportunity to watch either rich or entirely boring people act stupid, ugly and just wrong. We cannot turn away, because it provides a glimpse into ourselves, and we have trouble loving that.

Love is not an action, a word or a thing. It is a way of life from which one cannot turn away, because it is at once an action and a thought, bound by space and time. It is a wave of energy, a particle, an electron floating, spinning, bouncing through the quantum universe.

In reality, though, do we know what love is? Do we really know? Does society really want us to love? Is that how things get promoted or sold?

Let’s place blame, assign guilt, puff up our chests like peacocks and parade before an empty universe. Let’s built towers and structure, monuments to ourselves that time will tear down over the eons.

Nothing we do will last. We will be the subject of incredible archaeological finds 175 million years from now. Will love last that long?

The answer is not clear, but the effort to love seems important. It matters. It is a feeling that is an end in and of itself. Will it last forever?

Does love really matter? For as long as we are on this earth, it does. Hate takes a short life and twists it into a black hole. Black holes are scary…

About Spaciology

Spaciology is not abstract theory; rather, it is a practice you can feel.

  • Inside: Pause, breathe, notice.
  • Outside: Design rooms, rituals, and agendas that slow the spin and invite care.
  • Between us: Make dialogue a place where different truths can live together long enough to teach something.

Ultimately, leadership is the art of making space for what’s important (for everyone) and letting that clarity shape the next step. When we change the spaces from which we lead, our strategies change with them.

Spaciology Learning Commons

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The Validation

The Validation

Mar 2, 2019 | Love, Presence, Transformation, Truth

There is something deeply disturbing about the validation required by many today.

Did we eat the right food, say the right thing, buy the right product, look good doing it?

While not completely worthless–it is very rare when something can be designated in such a manner–social media is pretty close. Do we really need to say things to an audience of people that we for the most part do not know or honestly even care about?

Do you really care about Roger Jones, that dude you never talked to in 4th through 12th grade, but now 20 years later like each other’s posts about grilled cheese and babies?

Admittedly, there must be something biological that occurs when we post snippets of our lives on social media platforms. It sort of feels good. Yeah, our lives rock, our kids are too cute, our knowledge is too stellar.

It is crap. It really is a bunch of crap. There is something to be said for living within one’s own mind and heart and the parameters of a life you created with your own hands. A life that can be turned off or erased, which is entirely the case with social media, is not real.

The time we spend updating people we do not know, care about, or possible even like, can perhaps better be spent on the people with whom we work, love, or trying to love, etc.

There is an emptiness to social media, a puffing up of the proverbial chest, a step back into our primordial minds in which we must have sought validation wherever we could.

Validation cannot be bought, sold, or offered through video screens. Rather, it is an experience inside one’s mind, earned through breathing, letting go, crying, making mistakes, quitting jobs, landing them, giving birth, saying goodbye, falling down and getting up. 

Social media validates itself–that is all it does. It validates technology and the sadness we feel, but rarely express…

About Spaciology

Spaciology is not abstract theory; rather, it is a practice you can feel.

  • Inside: Pause, breathe, notice.
  • Outside: Design rooms, rituals, and agendas that slow the spin and invite care.
  • Between us: Make dialogue a place where different truths can live together long enough to teach something.

Ultimately, leadership is the art of making space for what’s important (for everyone) and letting that clarity shape the next step. When we change the spaces from which we lead, our strategies change with them.

Spaciology Learning Commons

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True Love

True Love

Sep 2, 2018 | Love, Presence, Transformation, Truth

In this day and age where we seemingly must “crush” everything in sight in order to prove ourselves to a world that seemingly watches our every move, is there a place for love anymore?

True love. What is it? Why does it matter?

True love may not even exist, but the idea of it is massive, and it exists in some form else how can we account for people that lose their lives saving the life of others? How can we account for this tremendous disparity in our world between what we say to people out loud, but privately value in our own heads and hearts?

True love matters. It is a feeling, a glimpse, a window into something better inside ourselves.

Is it better? Well, that is arbitrary, but when many people love well, it not only makes those around us feel better. It actually makes us feel better, too, right? The difficult thing today, however, is that acts of love and kindness are often not able to be caught within the frames of life we stare at on our phones, tablets, and computer screens.

True love is often quiet and sometimes is counter-intuitively experienced as pain. True love is not easy.

Is anything really easy, however? Can we click a button and really get that thing we desire, or need, or want? True love starts inside the mind with an idea. We can either fan its flame with breathe or extinguish it with the hardness of 21st-century thinking.

In a world of Big Data, true love is still not something that can be measured.

Just because something is not measured, though, does not mean it does not exist. Like a graviton, true love has never been captured, but evidence for its existence lies all around us?

Where do we find this evidence of true love? Close the door and look inside yourself.

About Spaciology

Spaciology is not abstract theory; rather, it is a practice you can feel.

  • Inside: Pause, breathe, notice.
  • Outside: Design rooms, rituals, and agendas that slow the spin and invite care.
  • Between us: Make dialogue a place where different truths can live together long enough to teach something.

Ultimately, leadership is the art of making space for what’s important (for everyone) and letting that clarity shape the next step. When we change the spaces from which we lead, our strategies change with them.

Spaciology Learning Commons

Want to go further? Join the Spaciology Learning Commons.

  • Free membership gives you access to community conversations and introductory resources.
  • Paid membership opens full access to courses, live sessions, and the complete Field Guide.
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