By Leah Tran

“The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.” – Jeannette Winterson, The PowerBook

I believe we have built a habit of treating love as a subject matter that we struggle to understand or even struggle to have in our lives. We search for it between the lines of our lives as if it's hiding from us. For a while I believed that it was something I could get “right,” and immediately. That maybe I can improve myself in a way that would make me finally enough and that perhaps maybe if I had given so much of myself to something or someone that I would be deserving of love. And all of this has only left me to be in a state of longing for something that was always there within and around me. Still today, I’m struggling to undo this story I tell myself. But I recently learned something recently that has perhaps changed everything, and it is a lesson I will keep returning to from time to time. 

I realized that love isn’t something meant to be found, it is something to be cultivated.

It isn’t something that is passive, rather it is an active commitment. It’s a commitment to noticing, to learning, to growing, to simply being present and open to love and loving itself. However, the media has long portrayed love as something outside of ourselves. That it comes knocking on hearts with pretty doors and misses those who aren’t “ready.” And we are left associating painful longing with love. This mindset can be compared to an attitude “of the man who wants to paint but instead of learning the art, claims that he has to just wait for the right object, and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it.”  

When we view love as something we are without, we lose our ability to notice the love we are given and the opportunities to give more of it. It is the search that holds us back from experiencing the very thing we are looking for.

Love begins with the act of noticing it, not searching. Searching implies heavily looking for something that seems to be out of your sights; noticing is the act of bringing into awareness what has always been there. Shifting to this mindset, I began to see all the instances of love that paint the walls of my life. 

It was that time I witnessed the joy of my best friend when she saw snow, and all I felt in my heart was the warmth of the wish for her to continue experiencing that happiness. It’s in the daily “good morning, I love you” texts I share with my mother that are reminders that we think of each other always even afar, it’s the generosity of my sister letting me stay at her place when I’m homesick.

It is not only about noticing, but it is about committing to accepting, learning, and creating. People, including the people we love and hold close to us, are stories that never stop unfolding. We are always changing, in flux, and to be held and confined in a certain idea inhibits the growth of ourselves and our relationships. I can recall the many times I had felt pain and disappointment only because someone did not fall into the idea I had of them. Which wasn’t fair to them, nor even me. Because there is nothing greater than being truly accepted for who you are in the present moment, there is nothing more precious than someone committing to learning and understanding you in order to build a good, substantial relationship. Perhaps I had not realized this until I saw how deeply I was loved by my family and friends despite all the changes and growth I continue to endure. It wasn’t until someone told me that they wanted to have a good relationship with me, and consistently made efforts to do so despite every phase I found myself in that I saw this. 

Having learned these things, I only want to tell myself this story: That love has always been within me, around me, and given to me and it has always been my right to experience it. That everyday there are opportunities to notice it and to create more of it, but it is only if I choose to do so. And I do want to, I really do.