Love in Motion

Recently I was talking with a friend about how I’d been having a tough couple of weeks. During quarantine I’d become accustomed to a kind of emotional rhythm— 3-4 days of feeling pretty good, followed by 3-4 days of feeling pretty bad. Each week divided roughly into dark and light halves.

But something had gotten thrown off and I’d been stuck in two weeks of darkness. There’s nothing wrong with feeling sad, but carrying all that around for a while had worn me down. So I was telling my friend about it. Which helped.

A few days later I got an envelope in the mail. It was suspiciously light, and when I opened it, five little slips of folded paper tumbled out. My friend had sent me handwritten notes to be opened each day that week. I laid them out on my dresser in a row, Monday to Friday, filled with a tender joy.

Every morning I’d wake up and feel a sparkle of delight in my heavy chest when I realized I had a note to open. My favorite was Thursday’s: “If all you do today is make a cup of tea, that’s good enough for me!” The little sparkle in my chest grew over the course of the week until I started to feel a little lighter, a little brighter. I felt like I could breathe for the first time in a while.

bell hooks (an authority on love if there ever was one) says that love is the action we take for another’s spiritual growth. I’ve often thought that love is the act of taking that warm feeling in your chest and doing what you can to make the other person feel it, too. Love becomes love when you turn your emotion into something that benefits the other person— something they can see and touch and know.

Love is inextricably linked to action. Love is in the doing.

My friend loved me. And she loved me in a way I could see and feel. I felt cared-for and respected— like my emotions mattered to her. With five little handwritten notes, she helped me set down my heavy things and led me out of the dark.

That’s what love does. That’s why we need it so much. Love brings us closer to the light.