Everything I know about love, and the one thing it took me a lifetime to learn.
If you sat with me now, near the end of a long life, and asked me for the one thing I know for certain, I would not tell you about work, or money, or even about God directly, though I am on my way to Him. I would tell you about love, because love is the one subject I have studied my whole life without ever once meaning to, and here is the first thing I know. I never stopped. Not once. Not one of them.
I have loved many people. Some of them are gone now, carried off by leaving, or by anger, or by distance, or by the earth. Some walked out of my life on their own two feet and never looked back. Some were taken before I was ready, which is to say all of them, because a person is never ready. And here is the thing the world has never understood about a heart like mine. I love them still. Not loved. Love. Present tense. This morning. Right now, as I say this, I am loving people who have not stood in a room with me for thirty years, people who would be astonished to learn they are still so tenderly held, and the loving of them has not dimmed by a single degree.
The world taught me to say I loved her, as if love were a season that came and cleared. I have never once been able to say it that way and have it be true. The love did not end when she left. Why would it. She was as worth loving on the day she walked away as on the day I first met her. She became absent, that is all, and absence has never been a reason to stop loving someone, only a reason to ache.
I have watched people stop loving someone because of what that someone did, or became, or failed to be, and a question always rose up in me and stayed. If you were able to find a reason to stop, then the reason was holding the whole thing up the entire time, and a love propped on a reason was only ever leaning on that reason, and it would fall the moment the reason was pulled away. A condition is a wall you build around a thing. Love is the one thing in this whole world with no walls anywhere in it. And people would ask me, as if love were a weight you could set on a scale, who I loved the most, and I could never answer, because each person came carrying a love cut to their exact shape and to no other, and I loved every one of them all the way to the edge of what I had, and the miracle I never saw coming is that there was always more. Loving one of them never once stole from another.
I am a potter, and I will tell you a secret about where I first learned to love. My first teacher in it was the clay. The clay will not be rushed, and it will not be forced, and it will not become anything at all for hands that come to it in a hurry or in anger. It asks one thing, every single day, and that thing is patience. You have to stay with it, meet it exactly where it is, give it your whole attention and your steady hands and your unhurried time, and only then does it soften and rise and become. Fifty years I did that, and somewhere in the middle of those years I understood that the clay had been teaching me how to love the entire time.
I could have ended my life there, and I would have died believing I understood love completely. But I would have been an old man being beautiful, and beauty has a way of leaving certain things out. Let me tell you the part I kept in the shadow for far too long, because it is the part that could have saved me years of my one life, and it may still save you some of yours.
Here is what all that radiant, reasonless, undying love never once taught me. It never taught me how to leave. It taught me to stay through anything, to endure, to pour myself out endlessly and call the emptying devotion, and so I stayed. I stayed in rooms that were slowly draining me to nothing. I stayed with people who took and took and had no hands for giving. I stayed while the love went one direction only, out of me and into them, with nothing ever coming back, and I named that faithfulness. It was fear wearing faithfulness like a coat.
Understand me carefully, because this is the knife’s edge the whole thing balances on. I never stopped loving those people. That is the truth that makes the rest of it hard. Withdrawing from someone and no longer loving them are two entirely different acts, and the world confuses them constantly, and that confusion keeps good people trapped for decades. You can walk away from a person still loving them with your whole chest. The love does not die. You simply stop setting yourself on fire to keep another person warm.
There is a love the poets and the preachers almost never mention, and it is the one that every other love rests upon, the way a house rests on ground you never think about until it shifts. It is the love you owe your own soul. I came to it late, far too late, and I have watched now how its absence ruins people. A person with no love for himself will accept scraps and call it a feast, will mistake being needed for being cherished, will let himself be drained to the last drop and thank the one holding the cup. He cannot leave what is killing him, because leaving requires a self worth protecting, and he was never taught that he was one. The ultimate love, the foundation the whole house stands on, is the love you turn back toward your own self. Without it, every other love in your life will slowly become a way of disappearing.
The wheel taught me this too, once I was old enough to hear it. When a pot is going wrong, off center, tearing, a young potter does what I did for most of my life, which is grip it harder, press in tighter, pour more of himself into saving the thing, until his own stubbornness pulls the whole vessel into a ruin his hands can no longer fix. The old potter learns the harder wisdom. He learns to lift his hands. He learns that some things on the wheel are already gone, and that gripping them does not save them, it only wastes the clay and exhausts the maker, and that the truest skill is knowing the exact moment to let the ruined thing be ruined and begin again with a piece that can actually hold. Lifting your hands off a thing you love is one of the hardest movements a maker ever learns, and it is not the failure of love. It is love that has finally grown wise.
Loving someone forever and letting them keep hold of you forever are not the same thing, and the failure to know the difference has destroyed more good people than any hatred ever has. You can love a person to the end of your days and still shut the door. You can carry someone in your heart and refuse them your presence. You can wish a soul every good thing under heaven and still choose, deliberately, to save yourself from what they do to you when they are near. That is not the death of love. That is love that has finally learned to include you in the list of the people it protects. Do not do what I did. Do not spend your best years proving your devotion by how much damage you were willing to absorb. The measure of your love was never how much of yourself you let a person destroy.
And here is the thing I understood only at the very end, the thing I would give my remaining days to have known at the beginning. The day I finally walked away from the love that was unmaking me, aching, still loving them, closing the door with my whole body shaking, I believed I was committing the one unforgivable sin against everything I had ever held true about love.
I had it exactly backwards.
That leaving was the truest act of love I ever performed. Not the staying. Not the enduring. Not the decades I spent bleeding in the dark and calling it devotion. The leaving. Because for the first time in my long life, love had finally reached the one person I had abandoned in order to keep everyone else, the one soul I was actually responsible for, the one I had been taught it was selfish to save. Me. Every love I ever gave was real, and I love them all still, this very moment, without a wall and without an end. But the last love, the hardest one, the one that looked from the outside like the death of love and was in truth its highest form, was the day love finally turned around, walked back through all those open doors I had left standing wide my whole life, and came home to me.