I’ve seen this post making the rounds, and I like it quite a lot so I’m sharing it. The general message is that love isn’t an emotion (e.g. Disney, every rom-com ever) but rather it’s about choices we make. And that’s a good message.

But there’s one line in the post that really stuck out to me in particular, which is this:

Through giving, through doing things for my wife, the emotion that I had been so desperately seeking naturally came about.  It wasn’t something I could force, just something that would come about as a result of my giving. In other words, it was in the practicality that I found the love I was looking for. (emphasis original)

This resonates with what I’ve written in the past about the relationship between the sacred and the mundane, and also with what Walker has written with his co-author (and DR commenter) Allen. It’s a beautiful message that’s easy to understand but hard to live by. Beauty, love, and all the ideals that we care about are there around us in the world, but we have to reach out and seize them through mundane actions rather than wait around for a non-existent life soundtrack to inform us that meaning is being rained down upon us by some cosmic director of our lives.