Falling In Love
Falling in love is one of the strongest positive emotions because it is accompanied by joy. When you are falling in love, whether it is romantic love, love for a newborn baby or even love for a newly acquired pet, the world seems a better place. Nothing or no one can bother you because you’re so incredibly happy.
In his book The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, Thomas Moore writes, “During my years of practice as a psychotherapist, I felt that people bringing me their stories of a foundering career, a failing marriage, a tenacious depression, or an overpowering addiction were suffering from a deeper malaise. They had fallen out of love with life itself which, in their adult years, had become an absorbing collection of problems.”
We’ve all experienced a scenario when a love relationship suffers because you have shifted your focus from all that you adore about your loved one to all the things you’d like to change. The more strongly you focus on the flaws, the more your loved one seems determined to display them. Spouses become annoyances, children spoiled brats and pets a real nuisance. Instead of being shrouded in a cloud of happiness, you are trapped in a downwardly spiraling tornado of negative emotion. You are falling out of love. Don’t get me wrong, you still love your loved one but that is very different from being in love. One is a fact, the other a delicious action.
Your viewpoint of the world matches and you fall out of love with life, too. That is how Law of Attraction works. Life gives you more of what you focus on.
What if, through the simple action of falling in love with life, all your problems were to fade into the background? They don’t go away; they become transformed by your love. Negative things that used to capture your full attention now become mere background noise.
True love is unconditional. You love that person or animal despite the traits you wish were different. That is what is required to fall hopelessly in love with life. Loving life unconditionally requires you to accept the parts of it you wish were different, to say, “You’re not perfect, life, but overall, you’re pretty darn great.”
Wishing your loved one would be different is one of our biggest time-wasters. In fact, wishing anyone or anything in your life would be different is a waste of precious time.
We could learn secrets of life from Mother Nature. Flowers naturally turn toward the sun. They reach for it knowing that it is the sun that brings life and makes living delicious. Many of us, if we were flowers would die very quickly because of our insistence on turning toward the dark.
For example, I’m often asked for an antidote to negative people. My answer is always the same, “Do everything in your power to be happy and just ignore them,” but we seem to struggle with that.
We turn toward the dark.
Let’s say you work with ten people. You really like nine of them but there is this one jerk—don’t you focus your full attention on the jerk? You don’t come home at night and tell your family about those nine wonderful souls you work with—you tell stories about the jerk. So now, not only are you working with the jerk, you’ve taken him home to your family!
When you’re in love with life, you don’t waste your energy on the jerks, you barely notice them. Because you’re in love, you attract things that are a match to that feeling. My friend Maude tells me that, when she’s in love with life and driving along the freeway, she’s inspired to divert her eyes from litter along the road and lift her gaze to the trees and the beautiful sky. The trash is still there but not in her line of sight; she’s focused on what’s good. She’s turned toward the light.
Being in love with life is a choice and one that can be made in any moment and under all circumstances. The moment you fall in love with life, it magically transforms itself before your very eyes. Life hasn’t changed—you have.
Don’t you just love it?
