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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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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