on love and relationships

As with everything else larger than our puny lives, experiences, and reasoning faculties, this is true: You don't find love, love finds you

I have really been understanding this more and more.

What's more, relationships (romantic, familial, friend, and otherwise) are so random and conditional on so many levels. People are happy when they're on caffeine. People like you when you've got something to offer them, from sex to social capital to a sense of security, to even a sense of validation. We are bonded through our ability "to relate" to one another. How natural, I've said all along. It is indeed all part of human nature. But more and more, how random, is how I feel about that discovery.

This is making the necessary challenge very clear to me: unconditional happiness, unconditional love. I had never really understood before I started studying and practicing dharma just how one loves another human being no matter what. Lately, it's been making more sense to me, how the flow of love continues and continues and is not attached to a person, thing, or idea. And how it contributes to the world when you commit a simple act of unconditional love. And how freeing it is to be able to expand the heart to love just because, and come what may. And how certain people in our lives can serve the function to help us realize these things, but are not themselves the embodiment of love.