Unconditional love in a conditional world
Ever since I was a child, I felt a limitless love in my heart that yearned to be expressed. An unconditional, boundless, timeless love. (you too?)
Since then, I’ve been in a lifelong exploration of how to love as big as my heart desires while also reckoning with the realities of life. I have no answers to this contemplation. But right now, as life is, I’m simply allowing my heart to feel this boundless love for a stranger, a neighbor, a lover, a friend - while at the same time, being very real about my limits and the limits of the people around me to give and receive that love in action and form.
To both move with an open heart while at the same time grounding in strong boundaries in how I express that love according to the reality of any given situation. Feeling love unconditionally and yet sharing myself in that love conditionally. For love is timeless, yet our time here is precious. For we are limitless, yet we are so limited too. For we are eternal souls, yet we are oh so fragile humans too.
As Mary Oliver, someone who reckoned with the greatest harshness and yet the most sublime beauty of life, reminds us
“Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?”
It does no one any good to suppress our inborn desire to love unconditionally, yet we exist in this conditional world with limits on the time and energy we have to share - and so we must take responsibility for how we choose to show up, who and how we choose to love in this one, wild, and precious life.
The way that this looks in my daily life right now is doing my best to deeply accept people in my life as they are, allowing my heart to feel the unbound, unconditional love for them that I desire to feel - and also making the hard choices about what I do and do not want to experience in these fleeting 24 hours in a day - trying to be more clear and precise about what I am available for and what I am not. An ongoing calibration of how much time and energy I share with the connections in my life, based on the current limits of how they can love me and how I can love them.
These are just some initial reflections on this particular topic, I’ll write more about this in the weeks to come - but in the meantime I’m so curious to hear about your explorations in your loving limits these days, share by leaving a comment below.
Love,
Sarah