You Can Stop Looking for Love

Lessons of 100,000 miles: Love isn't something you find. It's something you are.

Toni worked until 2 AM on a piece about our ride to Cleveland and the stanky motel awaiting us upon arrival. I’d had a different concept when my wife of forty-plus years, and partner in our quest to discover the origin, nature, and meaning of love across the country, first mentioned the idea. I’d also written about a previous motel horror story just days before. So when she asked if I’d read her piece the next morning, I paused. I was looking for a way to express my admiration for the writing, my preconception of it, and my concern about repeating the topic too soon.

That delay carried its own unintended message, though, and it stung her. After all the work she’d put in, I get that. We all want our creative efforts to be met with cheers, especially from those we love and respect.

After a few moments of tense silence, she took off her reading glasses and said, “I don’t want you to not give me an honest answer. I want your honest opinion of my work without worrying about my reaction. I know that’s why you didn’t say anything at first. I just worked really hard on that, and I thought it was pretty good. It hurts a little to get such a cool response to it, but I do understand what you’re saying. It’ll just take me a bit to deal with it.”

That is a profound way of saying I love you without saying “love.” In those few words, she valued me and my thoughts, acknowledged her understanding of how we deal with each other, honestly shared her feelings about it, and made it OK for both of us.

That is hard to do. It takes understanding, a balance of selflessness and self-awareness, compassion, and insight. It takes a surprising amount of personal work that no one sees or celebrates.

Looking For Love

As Toni and I - together since our teens - reached past middle age and a crossroads in our lives and careers, we kept hearing the same question, especially from younger people: “What’s your secret?”

The quest for love’s Big Secret isn’t new. But the more people asked, the more we wondered: Is there even a secret? And if there is, how could we possibly answer when everyone we asked defined love differently?

So we did what made sense to us. We climbed on our Harleys and spent several years and all our material treasure in this world exploring diverse cultures, people, lifestyles, places, and faiths across 48 states, asking everyone we met: What is love?

We expected to find Great Love Stories. Capital letters. The dramatic redemptions, the against-all-odds triumphs, the fairy tale endings. There were some, and they were magnificent.

But what we found more often was something far more profound: lowercase great love. Grass growing through life’s pavement. Water splitting stone, one drop at a time. Relentless patience and small acts of everyday devotion that no one writes songs about but that inexorably change everything in the world around them.

We found people learning to dance and speak foreign languages for each other. Doctoring each other’s animals and in-laws, eating Spam and beans for a year to buy a bicycle, waking up early to scrape ice off each other’s cars. Overcoming prejudices, addictions, and allergies for one another.

We found a couple who apologized for their “vanilla” story, then mentioned in casual passing that their daughter survived an inoperable brain tumor because they sold everything and showed up every day, never knowing if she’d live, keeping their family and careers orbiting around one another through sheer stubborn love. “It’s just what you do,” they said. “Anyone would have done the same.”

But anyone didn’t. They did. And it was mighty.

We found couples who’d been married for seventy-plus years still discovering new things about each other. A couple married four times each with kids from every marriage, cobbling together sixteen families, and several couples married several times who finally figured out that they’d kept putting love and marriage in the wrong order.

Sometimes the “partner” in the couple wasn’t another person, but a cause, an art, a faith, or a place. Like the man who’d rebuilt the entire original Star Trek set in a converted grocery store in upstate New York, and was using the tour money to rebuild his small town. The “van-lifer” in Branson, converting his ride into a mobile tea house to support sobriety and suicide prevention for veterans, or the underpaid and overworked volunteers at an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee.

Sometimes, the “partner” was someone whose soul was buried deep within a damaged shell, like a cracked Russian nesting doll. These were the love stories of the advocate for the families of death row inmates in Kentucky, the prison hospice workers in Colorado, and the drug abuse center counselor in Bangor, Maine who shared how many times he’s heard people slowly poisoning themselves on the streets say they were just “trying to find themselves. Love,” he said,” is the part of the story where you tell them, ‘I found you, mother**er. You’re right here. I see you.”

At Grace Community Church in Roswell, New Mexico, we met Pastor Rick Hale and his wife Mary, who gave us the most honest answer we’d heard to the understandable but ignorant question with which we’d started these journeys…”What’s the secret?”:

“There is no secret to it all. Just be kind to each other. And do it for a very long time.”

And so, we changed our question instead to “What is love?” Not the feeling, not the doing, but the thing itself.

And as the answer to that better question began to unfold, we started to see the true depth of those simple moments.

And, we increasingly saw the loneliness and personal tragedy of people seeking love who, after failing to find it “out there,” believed they were broken or not enough “in here”, or just not destined for it, when really they’d been looking in the wrong direction entirely.

Love Isn’t What You Think…or do. Or Feel.

Those 100,000 miles and their hundreds of conversations, interviews, and encounters, including leading minds in science, philosophy, faith, and consciousness studies, have revealed that love isn’t an emotion, and it's not an action - though it certainly inspires both. Rather, it is the intrinsic, motive, and creative aspect of consciousness itself. And that consciousness is universal, non-local, and non-dual.

Whether you know those terms yet or not, it still sounds like the kinds of things people say who’ve been smoking too much patchouli, sitting in trees barefoot, playing pan pipes, right? I get it - the science teacher, old biker, and longtime cynic in me took a long time to come to grips with all this, too, and Ill explore the basis for it all far more here in the weeks and months to come.

But for now, just imagine it’s true and sit with the knowledge of what it means for love: it isn’t something you can seek and find, possess, or lose. It’s not something people give or receive from each other. It’s not even something you feel or do.

It is already an inalienable part of you, like curiosity or a sense of humor; an aspect of your being, in the same way that you are intrinsically human, alive. Divine.

Love is - not poetically but literally - something you are.

This truth is based on the same universal concept of reality, spoken in different words, that we heard from the Tibetan monks in the temple at Woodstock, NY, the pastor of Dr. King’s church in Montgomery, Alabama, and the neuroscientists and quantum theorists at universities and labs across the country. Leaving the old classical, materialist paradigms behind, it is what today’s science is revealing about reality itself.

It turns out that quantum physicists are just Buddhists with better data.

And though our minds and histories are steeped in that old paradigm, trained to deny it, our hearts and souls naturally dwell in this knowledge.

I explored this in my TED talk as the concept of love being our “seventh sense” like sight or hearing, but for meaning and connection. Just as our eyes perceive light and our ears perceive sound, our consciousness is the sensory apparatus of love.

Others can offer you things to see, to taste, to experience through that sense. But they can’t give you the sense itself. Likewise, when you love someone, you’re not giving them something they don’t already possess. You’re perceiving them in a way that awakens that thing already within them, just as they do for you.

So, the question we should be asking when seeking love isn’t “where is it?” but “how do I recognize and express what’s already here? How do I see with this sense I’ve always had? How do I notice when my love overlaps with another’s, or when it’s lighting up the world around me in ways I’ve never learned to notice?”

And It Doesn’t Stop There

And here’s the most astounding, profound, timeless…simple part: If consciousness is universal and non-local, and if love is intrinsic to consciousness, then every time we love, every moment of connection, every time we are seen or recognize another person with that seventh sense, we’re not just creating feelings and doings. We’re participating in the fundamental work of existence itself. Creation itself knows itself better and grows a little “bigger” for us all.

Your love matters not just personally, or mutually, but cosmically. You’re not just living your life. You’re helping existence itself discover what it means to love and be loved. As you.

This is why the search for love isn’t about finding something missing and completing yourself. It’s about recognizing what’s already whole within, what’s happening because of you, and choosing to participate in it more fully, more consciously, more lovingly.

For those who sense that, even though they’ve never spoken it aloud, the “vanilla” stories can become delicious, extraordinary, as years of daily kindness, small attentions, and inside jokes turn into decades of constant change and growth.

Sometimes, within couples, people come to recognize when their love no longer overlaps, not because it vanished within them or anyone failed, but because they just weren’t making one another bigger anymore. Being and knowing love doesn’t always mean being “in love,” and yours is always still there, within you, even more than breath and bones. It’s okay. You’re still whole and still part; still you. And that’s all the universe asks or needs from you.

And for the lonely seekers, those thinking they lack love when they really only yearn to share its expression, desperation eases a bit. You’re not incomplete. You’re not broken. You’re not behind schedule. You’re exactly who you must be right now while still becoming something more all the time, already whole, already having and being love, simply “seventh sensing” a little harder to see when it overlaps with another’s, which it will. It’s inevitable, because love, like consciousness, is universal, nonlocal; we receive it and exist within that One thing, and in that way, none of us are every truly alone.

The soul of this realization is something Joseph Campbell’s vision captured with the idea that every story you hear is yours, a reflection of the universal human experience of the ‘hero’s journey’ that is a human life.

And that includes love stories. Yours. The one you’re living right now, but maybe haven’t recognized yet, because no one ever showed you where it fit on the map.

Not the dramatic arc. Not the great romance. Not the redemption or the rescue or the moment the music swells. What recreates the world is the love that is already you, from simply buying the coffee of the stranger behind you in the drive-through to making the soul-wrenching choice to give a beloved pet the final act of kindness you can offer them, and holding that paw as they run free somewhere you cannot follow. Or, saying the honest, hard thing with your reading glasses in your hand because you love someone enough to let them see you stung. The arc of your love matters profoundly.

You already know these moments. Something in you has always suspected they meant more than anyone around you seemed willing to say out loud.

They do. They mean everything. Because if love is intrinsic to consciousness, and consciousness is the fabric of all that exists, then every one of those moments is the universe knowing itself more deeply. Through you. Not through saints or mystics or poets, though them too. Through you, specifically, in the life only you can live, with the people only you can reach.

That couple in their kitchen who apologized for being “vanilla” didn’t know they were describing something cosmic. They thought they were just doing what anyone would do. But that’s precisely the point. Love moves through ordinary hands with a fullness of presence that transforms everything it touches. And most of the time, the people doing it have no idea how large they truly are, and how much bigger their love makes all of us.

Few of those Toni and I have met across a hundred thousand miles believed their story was extraordinary. But every one of them was already whole. Already enough. Already love.

And so are you. You always have been. You’ve found yourself; you’re right here.

You can stop looking.

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