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.

Share on Social Networks

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

Related Posts