Few people would disagree that love and friendship is a key part of everyone’s happiness. When we think of the rush of joy and warmth that filled us the last time our friend gave us a compliment, when our significant other smiled lovingly into our eyes, or when our pooch ran into our arms the moment we opened the front door, there’s no mistake that love can move us, change us, and make us come alive with happiness. We feel an unmistakable warmth and happiness when we’re on the giving side, too – that time when we gave a stranger a helping hand, or when we listened to and comforted a friend in distress.
Love is such an essential part of our lives that it truly deserves an endless amount of our appreciation for its power to create who we are and guide us on how we live our lives and impact others. It’s in everything we do and live for: our significant other, family, children, friends, work, workplace relationships, spirituality, community, society, and the world. And we don’t usually give much thought to its meaning and purpose in our everyday lives, but imagine how much fuller, more beautiful, more inspiring and mystical, and more worthwhile life would be if we lived more mindfully of love. Here are three characteristics of the power of love that we can contemplate on, even just 5 minutes a day, to help us be grateful of the love we receive from others and more mindful of the love we give.
1. Love brings everyone together
It’s a connecting force. It brings people together through commitment, friendship, and empathy. The existence of all the people around us are blessed gifts to us; because of them we experience the magic of feeling whole through the connection that’s created between our hearts. We were never meant to live in solitude, but always in the company, support, and togetherness of many people who were meant to be a part of our lives and who helped us be who we are today.
2. Love makes us grow
Love can be a challenge as much as it can be joyful. And that’s the beauty of it. The connections we make with those around us through our love and friendship will face hardships, too, because it’s a bringing together of two individuals with differences as well as the similarities. Sometimes, it takes patience, effort, acceptance, forgiveness, and time to make our love stronger than the force that temporarily tries to repel us. And that’s love’s way of helping us learn to make our love bigger and to grow into fuller, better individuals. The strong connections that are forged through these challenges is a shared, magical spiritual happiness that we won’t ever want to give up, once we’ve experienced how fulfilling and meaningful they are. The more that it’s tested, the bigger and stronger that our love becomes. We learn that love is so similar to faith. We can’t ever know for sure whether our love will last forever without mishaps like betrayal or without falling apart, but we continue to believe in it because it makes us happy and gives us hope for a beautiful future.
Growth also comes from mutual support between like-minded people. Understanding and unconditional acceptance through thick and thin creates an eternal, magical bond between souls. Having someone who loves and accepts you no matter your imperfections or how badly you’ve fallen, failed, or erred, gives us courage and strength beyond our imagination, because true love loves you for who you are deep down, the eternal you, and not just the you within a moment in time. They inspire tremendous strength within us to keep going and keep persevering to become better people because of them. Deep down we’ve always known that our purpose is not just to live for ourselves but for the people we love, cherish, encounter every day, and as many people as possible.
3. Love keeps going and giving
Love works by giving and it keeps on going. Love creates happiness within us because we’re not thinking of ourselves, but thinking of giving, caring, loving, supporting, and encouraging others. In the formula for love, those who give are always also receiving love in invisible ways. When we make others happy, happiness is created within us instantly, and this is one way that love returns to us. And this is why love is a happiness-generating power that will just keep flowing into and through us limitlessly if we keep giving with a pure heart.
