The best gift you can give others is to have your own life work.

The best gift you can give to others is to realize they are not you.

The best gift you can give to others is to keep your advice to yourself.

The best gift you can give to others is all of yourself.

The best gift you can give to others is ...

What do you think?

I know now that there are some things I did not understand about love, mainly because I never thought I needed to ask or find out. I never asked, for example, what is love really was made of? What does it look like for me?  I assumed I would ‘know it when I saw it.’  Or worse, perhaps, I just accepted without thinking, that it looked like the images in romantic movies or wedding photographs.

Without much inquiry it's easy to take love to consist entirely of a feeling: elation, excitement, heat.  It is out there to get or find it ... or lose.  Someone we like the look of arrives and gives us attention or someone approves of us - and it's here! We feel great. We feel 'love'.  And so we keep an eye open,  looking for it to pop up like a happy accident in our lives.  When we get fed up waiting, we try to induce it.  A lot of celebrity behavior screams "please love me!"  Much of self-improvement is an attempt ot love ourselves without ever asking the question "what does that mean?"

As I've opened up more questions like those above, I have come to recognize love as an experience of good will and connectedness with myself and others.  It has a lot of flavors, ranging from deep gratitude, to acceptance and compassion for someone's pain, to the warmest feeling of wanting the best for someone. 

I may not experience all of the flavors all the time, there is one thing about love that is a new experience, totally unlike romantic gushy love,  and that is that love is instantly available to me all the time.

It may well seem like love is something that comes and goes based on what someone is doing (being nice or mean, for example), but when I've been open to challenging this and tried to love others on a deeper level, no matter what is happening, I find that love is there.  It's available if I chose it.

If that is really true, it means it is possible to love everyone and myself all the time, if I want to.  It makes love a choice, not a reaction.

One of my proudest moments of late was the day I got a call from my daughter to tell me she was completely changing life direction.

"I've thought about it," she said, "and life is too short to not do what I've always wanted to do."

The decision to switch focus to Marine Biology means that school will take longer now.  She has to start over in some respects.  But there was so much passion, clarity and excitement at the decision, that I felt an immediate surge of happiness within me.

I realized that is the feeling of unconditional love for another person.  When all you want is their happiness.

It was only later that I noticed something else. Something even more significant.

As she heads further along this path, the love for what she's chosen to do has literally infected everything and not only is she enjoying the required classes, but describes them as "easy". 

And yes, we are talking about math.

Now somehow I don't think they lowered the math standards.  What's going on, I think, is that doing what you love changes the context you are working in and therefore changes your experience of whatever is in front of you.

If that's true, then it has to be true for anything.  You will experience whatever is in front of you depending on what you bring to the situation.

You can try this out by consciously deciding what you will bring to a situation. You can decide to make your next commute 'joyful' or your next laundry day 'magical' and see what happens.

When I made an LA commute 'relaxed' - I spent the drive looking for reasons to enjoy the scenery and relax.  My mind collected all the information it needed to be content with things and minimized the rest.  I just overlooked it.  Often we say we can't overlook things.  But we most certainly can.  We can decide at any moment what to make important. I find it fascinating how this works.  And the repercussions, if you really consider this, are vast.