the myth of doing something important

or: how to love the world

You can simply be in love with the world.

But for a long time, I didn’t really believe that.

I felt I needed to do something really “important” with my life. I needed to produce some great work, or have the most amazing relationships, or achieve some heroic feat.

I believed that I needed to do something important in order to be worthy of existence. If I was worthy of existence, in turn, that meant that I would be loved. Love was something I had to earn.

But love is a felt experience. It encompasses mind & body. The experiences of receiving love & giving love, being loved vs loving, are very similar. Many people say they are seeking to be loved, but what they actually want to do is love. The good news is that is always available. There is always something to love, if you’re skilled enough.

The happy coincidence here is that loving well is the most important work you can do. The act of appreciation is a creative act, no matter what form it takes. If you orient towards love, you will create love, no matter what. It might not be on the most obvious scale, it might not have the most obvious impact, but it’s there.

Think of the love that a grandfather has for his granddaughter, which doesn’t manifest fully until years later, when she’s able to access a quiet confidence with herself, a knowing that someone loved her so deeply. Can you measure the impact of that kind of love? Maybe if you pay attention. But then an echo of that same love gets passed to her daughter, and her granddaughter, and so on. It unfolds over centuries. Is that not a great work?

Maybe that will be your highest achievement: an afternoon spent with your grandchildren. Or maybe your great work will be the love you pour into something you write, or something you paint. Or maybe your great work will be noticing a particular bird outside your window, taking a moment to observe it, and really seeing its beauty in a way that no one else in this world ever will. Is that not creating something? Is that not worthy?

Love creates love. There really is no way to know what your important work will be, but we can trust in that principle that if we are orienting towards love, we will create beauty. The easiest way to orient towards love is just to notice what’s around you and let it in. It’s not even an effortful act. It’s not a matter of doing. It’s just about letting the beauty in.

It’s actually impossible to avoid. As I’m writing the initial draft of this essay, I’m in my car staring out at the ocean and the sun is out and it’s glittering on the water and there’s a seagull bobbing on the surface. I could look at that sight forever. I could contemplate that forever. You could spend a hundred years staring at the way the light moves on the water and still not fully appreciate its beauty. The beauty is infinite.

In Dante’s Divine Comedy, in the highest circle of heaven, the angels are circling around God eternally, in an act of constant contemplation. Their whole existence is appreciation. Their whole existence is love. I don’t think there is any other way to live.

So let yourself do that. Notice the ways you were already doing that. Notice the ways you are already in love with the world. Let that love be the creative energy that carries you forward.

It might be a heartbreaking love. It might be a love full of grief, rage, and disappointment. But that is love nonetheless. So let it in. Notice it. In the words of Mary Oliver:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

With love & appreciation,

Scott

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