Love and Being in the Moment

This is true love. You don't think this happens every day? from The Princess Bride

When I started out to write this particular blog, intending it to be the last one in this little series on living in the moment, I just started to write which I sometimes do. The first thing I wrote was how basic and simple this was and probably everybody already knew it all.

Then I wrote more words and it got more complicated. If I had had a pencil, I'd have been using an eraser a lot. I went in circles; and if I was doing an abstract, those circles would have wandered all over the place.

Love and being in the moment turned out to not be simple at all and when I got finished with what I had written, I thought, well this whole thing is very important.  I'll let this go anyway but maybe somebody else can straighten it up.

That lasted until I woke up one morning, one of those early ones where I get the chance to lie there awhile, and the whole idea of what I was thinking was circling around in my head until it began to coalesce in a very different way than my first effort. I knew I had to start writing immediately or I'd lose it all. I had to start over without knowing where it'd go and I did just that.

There are many kinds of love and some things that we call love are not at all. The true deal, the kind of love, that really means something, goes beyond an emotion, and it goes beyond action. It is centered deep within us and it can be 'felt' for many things and people all at the same time. Love doesn't get used up and it's not limited.

To think of how love impacts being in the moment is where it all gets touchy and difficult. Although I do 'know' some things about it but not how they fit together, I am not sure there is one big puzzle, where when I put the last piece in, it can be seen as a whole. Love and how it impacts us with being in the moment may not be that simple but love itself is.  And, love itself could be another whole blog, heck a book, just on it. I will leave it that love is not relationship. It doesn't even demand relationship. Love just is.

Love and being in the moment though, that isn't always 'just is.'  So I am going to try again with this and a following blog. This one, about love itself, is a prep for the second one.

To begin at the beginning, love is to feel an emotion inside when a person thinks of the beloved which could be a person, a place, an animal, a spiritual entity, pretty much anything where there is this sensation we call love. Scientists tell us, or used to tell us, that all such thinking and feeling is in the brain; but when we think of love for something/someone, that is not where the emotion centers. It's in the heart.

Those who study chakras won't find that surprising because they have noted where the chakras, energy points, are in the body and the heart chakra is right where we feel this surge of love when we think of our beloveds. If the surge is lower, that's not the same thing and it is more likely to be lust (there is a chakra for that too). I personally think like is more logical and brain centered (Farm Boss disagreed with me). To me love isn't based on logic nor does it even have to make sense. It is not centered in the brain.

True love is concern for the other over ourselves. It is unselfish (that does not mean stupid about it). True love actually looks to what is best for the other and that goes beyond doing what they want automatically. True love sometimes releases the beloved to go on without us. True love is unconditional and forever.  Relationship, even with the beloved, is neither of those things.

True love is both the easiest thing in the world and the hardest. It is hard to explain in words-- hence all the poetry and books about it-- because it's not based on something that can be laid out logically. When it is experienced fully and in the moment, I think it is one of life's greatest pleasures. Where lust might not want to live in the moment, unless that lust is being satisfied (and then it's anxious for when its next satisfaction will come), love doesn't have that problem.


Love is not about an action. It is not about owning or even attempting to own. It's not about what we do or do not do about it. It just is. And what it is, is basic to human and I believe animal survival. Without love, life is not as full and sometimes ceases to exist at all. It's not about others loving us but our capacity to love period.

Where it all gets tricky for me is when I try to think how love fits to being in the moment. And that will come in the next blog as thinking about what love is (comments are welcome with possibly other aspects that I have missed or amplifications) is quite enough for one short blog.

And not that it should be necessary to add but this is all just my opinion. It is what I have experienced and what I bring to it is almost 67 years of living where sometimes I have thought about it deeply and sometimes just let it lie. I have known a diversity of kinds of love in my life (and a few things I called love but weren't), but I don't know it all and likely never will.

The photo is from Montana, at a house we rented there a few years ago which unfortunately ceased being a rental later but was a great spot to be in  Montana outside of Livingston. The rainbow though seems apropos for the way it's this goal and ethereal with all kinds of spiritual connotations to it and yet at the same time a real phenomena.  The myth is we find its start, and we get a pot of gold. We see a lot in life that way that seems to offer that pot of gold one way or another but the beauty of the rainbow never really is about its end.