Living vs. LIVING

It's been said that the secret to life is living. Isn't that what we do just by being? We breath, we eat, we sleep, we live.

Yet no one talks about living in those terms unless the subject is life or death. When dealing with the great sleep, "still breathing" matters a great deal.

That dichotomy suggests there is more to life than just living - that there's a process, a vital process, that transcends survival and rudimentary functioning to capture and explain what's really important.

We all know what that is; it's everyone's favorite four letter pejorative that has become both the weal and woe of our species: love. I say that the secret to life is love.

That over-whelming passion is what lifts the human condition beyond mere survival and breaths vibrant emotion into our existence. We MUST cradle that spirit within us for someone(s) and/or something(s) if we are to claim our birthright.

Love represents all strong, genuine passion that flows through the bedrock of our souls and causes the rumblings deep within that drive us to action. Hatred, sorrow, love, joy: these are the keys to our true selves, the selves we yearn to inhabit and be.

So then, if this emotion is the secret, how do we use it? That is both easy and hard; it's easy to say "we must fuel our lives with this passion" but it's terribly challenging to grok HOW to do that. It's a simple thing to say "I love 'x'" but far more demanding to find ways to live so that our passion for 'x' is realized in our work, our leisure, our subconscious. And yet only folks who manage to collect the essence of these emotions within themselves ever fully experience life.

Everyone else just lives.