I recently came across an idea from Arthur Brooks that has stayed with me: True love is a link to the Divine.
I have been thinking about what that really means. We spend so much of our lives searching for love. Hoping to find someone who
understands us, someone who chooses us, someone with whom we can share the ordinary and extraordinary moments of being alive.
We speak about love as something we hope to receive, something that might finally make us feel less alone.But perhaps we have
misunderstood something about its purpose. What if love is not so much about what we receive, but about what it allows us to
become?I have spent much of my life observing animals, often in places where human presence feels almost insignificant. I have
witnessed tenderness, patience, devotion, separation, and the extraordinary instinct to protect another life. I have watched a mother
stand beside her young without any apparent need for recognition. I have seen animals remain close to one another in silence, asking
for nothing beyond the simple comfort of being together. There is something profoundly moving about love that does not need to
explain itself. And I wonder if that is what Brooks means by the Divine. Not necessarily something religious, or something that exists
somewhere beyond our reach, but something we are capable of experiencing here, through another living being. Perhaps love is one
of the rare moments when we forget ourselves. When another's happiness matters as much as our own. When we stop measuring
what we are receiving and simply feel grateful that someone, or something, exists. I think there is an important difference between
falling in love and truly loving. Falling in love can be overwhelming. It can fill us with hope, longing, excitement, and fear. We want to
be close. We want to be chosen. We want to know that what we feel is felt in return. And there is nothing wrong with any of that. It is
part of being human. But perhaps true love begins when we can see beyond our own longing. When we recognize another being not
for what they might bring into our lives, but for who they are, entirely separate from us. To love someone without needing to possess
them. To appreciate their existence without trying to shape it into our expectations. To wish them well, even when their journey is
different from our own. Of course, this does not mean love should require us to abandon ourselves. I believe we all deserve to be
loved with the same honesty and tenderness we are willing to give. But I am beginning to wonder whether love's greatest gift is not
always the relationship itself, but what the experience teaches us about our capacity to care. I think about the simplicity of placing
my hand on my dog's body and feeling her breathe. Neither of us needs to say anything. There is no past to explain, no future to
promise. Just two living beings sharing a moment neither will ever have again. I think about the animals I have encountered in the
wild, many of whom I will never see again. Their lives continue somewhere beyond my understanding, completely independent of
mine. And yet, for a brief moment, our worlds crossed, and something in me changed.Isn't that extraordinary? That we can be moved
so deeply by another life, even one we barely know. Maybe that is the sacred part. The realization that we are not separate from
everything around us. That beneath all our differences, our ambitions, our disappointments, and our endless attempts to understand
life, there is this remarkable ability to feel connected. And perhaps the Divine is not something we need to find. Perhaps it is
something we touch whenever we love without asking the world to give us something in return. I don't know if I fully understand
true love. I suspect it is something we spend our entire lives learning, often through our mistakes, our losses, and the people and
creatures who leave their marks on us. But I find comfort in the possibility that no love sincerely given is entirely lost, even when it does not become what we hoped. Because perhaps the purpose of love was never only to keep someone beside us. Perhaps it was
also to open something within us. To make us a little more compassionate, a little less afraid, a little more capable of recognizing
ourselves in another living being. And maybe that is what it means to be connected to the Divine.
Not to become something greater than human. But to become more deeply human.
