The substance of life, the purpose of our existence, and the reason we keep on persevering day after day, is not something we must seek to find. In fact, we’ve known it from they we were born, because it was in the eyes of our mothers. It’s the one thing we cannot live our lives without, and when we lose it, it destroys every particle we are made out of.
It’s what drives us to pursue the career of our dreams, to marry a stranger, to take a shower start a family, and keeps us from taking our own lives, even when everything else is falling apart. The substance of life is deep inside us, but you don’t have to dig for it, because it arises on its own every time your heart calls for it. It’s something we all know very easily, and connect with so deeply.
The substance of human life is love. Love for others, love for yourself, and love for anything that turns the corners of your mouth upwards. Love comes in many forms, and hides itself in many different situations in life. You can create love, you can find love, but you cannot escape nor live without love. Love is being, love is becoming, and love is who we are.
Imagine a man in his mid-thirties; he’s working at a corporate job that he absolutely hates, but he stays at it, because the money is steady. But he is not using the money for his own personal materialistic desires, he’s using it to provide for his wife and three kids at home. His drive at his job is for the money, but his drive for the money is to nurture his love for his family. Love is his ground.
Love is the ground of which many passions and desires grow upon. A passion or a dream begins with the love for the act of doing that something, or the desire to gain something. This can also come in dark forms, such as the love for being powerful, or the love for being envied. Love is not always good and happy.
It can be toxic, and it can influence bad decisions the same way it influences good ones. This is called false love. But in the end, it is still a form of love. We consider the good love “real” love. If you have love- any kind of real love, and you lose it, it will destroy you. Whether that be a breakup, a death, a shattered dream, or even a loss of love for yourself, it tends to feel as if you can’t move on.
And if you do move on, it is because of a new love. That new love could be a new human relationship, a new passion, or a new puppy. When love is lost, a hole is made in us, and that hole can only be filled with a new love. No amount of materialistic wealth could fill it, unless that the basis of obtaining those materialistic possessions was a new genuine love for the self. If that hole is never filled again, that is when people drift into voids.
Love is what fulfills us, and makes us who we are. If we did not love, we would be making drastically different choices, because we make decisions based on what we care about most, and care is a form of love. If we did not care about anything, our lives would nearly be pointless, for to care about something puts value onto something.
For example, we create justice systems because we value fairness between each other. If there is no care, life would have no real value, therefore life would be meaningless.
That being said, some would argue that life never had meaning in the first place. It is possible that everything is just simply happening, and any strange circumstances are just coincidences, and if that were true, then love itself would be an illusion. Like Plato’s story “Myth of the Cave” people living in caves and staring at shadows that were not real, love would just be another shadow.
And if that were the case, then whatever is beyond the cave is more fulfilling than love, and if people already lose their minds in love, then how could they ever handle what is outside? If love is not the meaning or the substance of life, then the meaning would be something so far beyond us that it would be practically unobtainable, because love rests deeper in ourselves that we sometimes can barely reach it. The power of love can nearly destroy us, or take over our whole lives, so how could we ever search for something more?
Love was the first thing we saw when we were born and we looked into our mother’s eyes. It has been permanently engraved into us and cannot be repressed until we are dead. Whether or not love is still present after we die is not certain, but what is certain is that it is alive and flourishing when we are alive.
Relationships are one of the most known forms of love. Not just human to human relationship, but the relationship with the self, and the relationship to the earth and much more. Though relationships can also come in forms of hate, most relationships begin with love. In human to human relationships, a love begins with the desire to be with and near that other person, and sometimes that love gets deeper and develops into the want to share parts of your own live with them.
People who are deeply in love sometimes toss around words such as “soulmates” because they feel that their “soul” is not completed without the other person. This feeling of completion is fulfillment. Love is the only source of true fulfillment, and without fulfillment, like a cup without liquid, we are empty.
When we are fulfilled with love, our eyes open up to see the world in an entirely new perspective. Being in love creates the ability to see love existing in anything and everything. When Plato talks about getting out of the darkness of the cave we live in and out into the light of what really is real, it is very similar to the way we fall in love, which means love could be the answer to what is outside the cave of shadows. When one begins to fall in love deeply with something or someone, fear rises to the surface because of how profound the feeling of real love can be, just like the way Plato mentions how fearful men would feel walking out into the unknown of what exists beyond the cave. And once we are used to the light outside of the cave, or the love that now is planted within us, we see a whole new world clearer than we ever could imagine.
What is life without love? The answer is simple: nothing. There is no life without love, because love is what builds us- shapes us into who we are now. Love is a part of being and also becoming. We cannot be without love, because love is the ground- love is what we first recognized when we came into this world.
And we cannot become without love, because what makes us grow and flourish is fulfilling ourselves, and the only true fulfillment is love. There is a reason why almost every movie we watch, or story we read has an element of love, because we crave it. Love is the food in which we feed ourselves to exist, to make an individual of ourselves, and to persevere through hardships. Love connects us, and makes us who we are: human. The Beatles were right, “love is all you need”.
