Yesterday I posted

‘Why feel good when you can feel love?’

Maybe you bumped into it.

And maybe you got what I was trying to say.

And maybe you (still) have no clue.

Here’s what I saw.

Feeling good is a preference.

Love is a choice.

You can love without the need to feel good.

You can love without the absolute condition of agreeing to something.

You can love as a starting point.

There can still be opinions and judgments and preferences, for sure.

Those things make you feel good and they’re part of life.

But when you love EVERYTHING, you’re simply open to it.

You give it your undivided attention.

No matter how much you dislike it, you still have a sense of why it’s important or awesome or special, as a crucial part of being alive and having all possible experiences, not as part of your treasured set of Wants and Musts.

Loving life doesn’t mean ‘liking everything’.

It doesn’t mean feeling good all the time, per se.

It means being open enough to appreciate the differences, the confusion, the anger, the dullness, and the sadness.

It’s not about what you like, because that’s the mind, and it’s just a dense clump of stubborn fucking beliefs.

It’s way more.

It’s before.

It’s after.

It’s forever.

And always.

Of course, I’m painting a somewhat ideal picture here.

But this is not about waiting to make that happen.

It’s about

‘Hm… never thought about it that way, what if I could even love what I don’t like, without the desire to change it or even get rid of it?’

Can you love what’s not within your conditioning, what’s not personally accepted as good or preferred?

Remember: there’s no obligation to like it!

What would happen if you did the loving thing, the open thing, the interested thing, the attention thing?

Could life become a little bit more relaxed, and a little less burdened?

And what could happen after THAT?

Feeling good is just a state of mind, and it’s cool and awesome and yummy and juicy because it feels good.

But states of mind come and go.

Loving life can be everything and always.

(Photo by @jzoerb, for Unsplash)