How is Love the Most Positive Emotion That There Is?
Because love is both bigger and simpler than you think and feel that it is.
Shopping at the grocery store, I saw that all the Valentine’s candy was on display. Chocolate hearts everywhere.
Valentine’s Day is my least favorite holiday. The reasons are many, and frankly inconsequential to this story – save one. Love is falsely represented by Valentine’s Day.
How’s that? Everywhere you look, Valentine’s Day celebrates relationships, intimacy, romance, and various other notions of overblown, romantic love. It implies – and sometimes outright says – that this is the most important love that you can have.
This notion of romantic love isn’t just the purview of Valentine’s Day. Tons of books, TV shows, movies, and scripted programming across other media puts the notion of it on a pedestal. All of them claim that it’s the ultimate achievement, and without it you’re nothing.
This often leads to another utterly surreal place. A whole genre of media exists around broken hearts and people who have been hurt by love. It has broken them, they can never love again, and blah, blah, blah.
This is where it all goes off the rails. Why? Because real love – the truth of what it is at its core – can never cause hurt or harm. It is always a positive emotion.
But like many things in the world – love often gets mistaken for other emotions and ideas.
What is love?
Defining love is something people have been seeking for all of time. Unfortunately, a great many ideas and emotions related to it get called love – and that’s where the mix-ups begin.
At its ultimate core, it is a creator. It’s a force of empowerment that fulfills purposes both simple and complex.
Love is life itself.
Really, it’s that easy. Life is a product of it – whether it’s the rain and sun growing plants, the passing of genetic material to grow animals, or air and water molecules forming clouds. Love is life.
However, this isn’t entirely literal.
Nearly anything that has life is love. This can include music, books, ideas, dreams, and more. It is free thought, color, imagination, anything, and everything that you can use to create.
When you create you are bringing it into the world. You grow knowledge and understanding and build upon what you know. The more you know the more you can teach and spread the love.
What about bad creations? With few exceptions, even creations used for bad had a loving intent. Expansion of knowledge can come with a terrible price – and before you know it, there’s a new destructive force in the world. However – unless the intent is hateful and/or destructive, the creation is one of love.
Love is simple. It’s the sun in the sky, water at your feet, air in your lungs. Truly, it is life itself.
How does this get confused?
Many of the notions of love are not about love itself – but other emotions and ideas that might begin as it but evolve (or arguably devolve) into something else.
What emotions and ideas are these? Lust, possession, obsession, jealousy, fear, ideas of a soulmate/twin flame, “the one”, perfectionism, and more.
When any of the above gets tied into love – is it any wonder it appears that it can include pain? More than one of these notions is full of potential to set you up for failure.
How?
Let’s start with lust. Lust can feel like love, and it can be part of lust. But they are wholly separate notions. Lust draws in other thoughts and feelings beyond love itself.
Possession and obsession? Both start as love – but love is free. It can’t be caged or held in one place and unchanging. Sorry, that’s just not real – and it’s not love.
The ideas of a soulmate or “the one”? To be fair, sure, this could be legit for some. But it is not just romantic, idealized love. Of course, you can fall in love with someone and share your whole existence with them. But that goes past it into other connections. This notion is tied to other ideas and emotions beyond love itself.
It is a force of positivity and good. But when you tag other emotions and ideas onto it – often, involving intimate relationships – that’s where it gets confused. And you mistake another emotion or idea as love being the cause of pain. But the cause of pain isn’t love – it’s the other emotions that are mistaken for it.
Love, at its core, does no harm. It’s an ultimate force of good and positivity in the world. It gets confused when mixed with these other ideas and emotions.
It is both simple and defies a simple explanation
Love goes beyond thought and feeling. It’s more than idea and emotion. I could argue that it’s probably the first idea and emotion in the universe.
How? It is a force of creation. Whether you believe in God creating the Universe in 7 days, the Big Bang Theory, another creation story, or some combination of many – it all led to you and me. Creations borne of love in its truest form.
Wait a sec. Hold the phone. Did this just get too esoteric? Too hooky-spooky? Maybe it is. But everything I’ve ever read about religion, spirituality, conscious reality creation, mindfulness, and all else on these lines references love the same way. It is a force of ultimate positivity. It’s a force that gets attached to others – I think in part because it’s too simple to be believable.
As humankind grows, evolves, and develops greater technologies, we reject the simple. Look at how people lived just a hundred years ago and see how many elements of that lifestyle you’d likely reject today for being too simple.
But simple doesn’t mean it isn’t right and/or good. Love is both simple and defies a simple explanation – much like all the great questions of life, the universe, and everything do.
And that is how it is the most positive emotion that there is. Because it’s an ultimate creator and can empower phenomenal things from a simple source.
Recognizing that love is ultimately very simple isn’t hard
It’s all about working with mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, and intentions to direct your actions.
When you pause and see that love, in and of itself, is a force of pure positivity – and negatives attached to it are different emotions or ideas – you can accept and do more with it. Knowing that it’s a simple force of creativity for good, you can seek to both get more and give more to the world to expand it and its positive influences.
This empowers you – and in turn, your empowerment can empower others around you. Then that can expand to change the bigger picture matters, too.
Taking an approach to positivity and negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts matters in a way to open more dialogue. In that form, you can explore and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.
Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.
Lastly, the better aware you are of yourself in the now, the more you can do to choose and decide how your life experiences will be. When that empowers you, it can also open those around you to their empowerment.
To me, that’s a worthwhile endeavor to explore and share.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the four hundred-and-sixty-ninth entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.
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