If you cherish the things you love, never take loved ones for granted

By David McElroy · April 22, 2020

There are moments when I love my life so much that the joy is almost painfully overwhelming.

These moments happen every day. They’re the moments when I’m in love with the world and with the beauty all around me — and more than anything else, with the people and things which I’ve chosen to love.

Tuesday evening, Lucy rode with me to get gasoline for the car. She loves her little car trips and she seems to be happy to be close to me. The photo above is her sitting in my seat while I was outside filling the car‘s tank.

As we headed back home, Lucy put her head on my right shoulder and nuzzled my neck. She was happy and wanted to be close. As I reached my right hand up to rub the fur of her head, I felt filled with love for her — and love for the joy of this moment of being with her.

It’s those shared moments of love and gratitude and pure joy which I most miss about having the love of a partner in my life.

There are times when I experience joy and beauty so powerfully that they fill me with the need to reach out to someone I love and say, “Do you know how wonderful you are? Do you know how happy I am that you’re in this world?”

It might be a sunset that makes me feel that way. It might be a powerful piece of music. It might be an overwhelming sensation of the love of God.

Sometimes it’s just a flower. Or a bird that’s close to me. Or maybe a squirrel.

Other times, it’s the majesty of a tree that I love. When I get home in the afternoon — during the spring and summer — I step out of my car and look up into one of the most beautiful sights in this world. I can’t capture the experience in a photo, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. (There’s an example from last week below.)

When I have such powerful sensations inside, my heart overflows and the emotion naturally flows toward whoever I love. I want to pick up the phone and hear her voice. I want to tell her how wonderful she is. My heart needs to express love in those moments.

Because love for a specific person is what makes the joy of the world so worthwhile to me.

I know a lot of people who claim they love some specific person or their families, but I never see evidence of that. And there are times when I know the person who this other person claims to love — and that person tells me that he or she feels taken for granted — and that whatever love might have been feels dead and gone.

I can’t judge what might have once been in someone’s heart for someone else, but I do know that love is an active thing. Love doesn’t mean making a commitment at some point and then treating someone as the scenery of his life.

That isn’t real love.

Real love is about sharing. Real love is about attention. Real love is about communication and mutual growth and a million other things. Real love has to keep moving forward — or it starts to die.

Even now — long after I’ve had reason to feel loved by a specific person — I can’t help having my attention pulled to someone when my heart overflows. Inside my head, I speak to her and say, “I love you, dear.”

And I desperately need to express that.

For me, love will always be about active expression of a growing and active internal joy that animates my heart and makes the world make sense. And that’s why it’s so painful when there is no one there who wants to be the object of my love — when there’s no one to receive what I need to give.

This world is a stunning delight of beauty and love and joy. Yes, there are also terrible things. There are pain and loneliness and hurt. But all of those things fade in significance when real love for another is present and real and active.

Real love is what gives the rest of life meaning. Only a fool ever takes that for granted.

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I haven’t posted anything new in my YouTube series about narcissism in the last couple of weeks, so some people have been asking about it. There’s nothing wrong and I’ll be back soon. The issue is simply a technical problem because of a piece of equipment that died. Here’s a brief video I posted on YouTube to explain.

On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

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