"Love is that which enables choice."

There are two images that come up for me when contemplating this. The first is a branching pattern, which has something to do with the potential of a person, or any living thing. It’s about the possible futures available to me. The more free I am, the further down this tree I can see. The more possibility/potential available to me. For example, in a conversation where I feel safe and trusting of the other person, where I know the other person is not trying to manipulate me or the conversation, but rather simply exploring alongside me in the spirit of truth and playfulness, I can see at any given time a number of different directions I could take the conversation. I can see all these branches ahead of me, not knowing precisely where they’ll take me, but trusting that when I do choose one, it will take me and the conversation somewhere, rather than to a dead-end. And then the idea is that love is that which affords this kind of freedom, choice, potential. A conversation is just one example of this. Creation and choice-making in general is less bounded where there is more love.

The second image is of the kind of complex unity that characterizes living systems. A good way I’ve found to measure a living system’s capacity for love is to ask, how much difference can be contained within this system and still remain a unity rather than fragment? An individual that holds great depths and heights within themselves, the potential for both tenderness and anger, for example, while remaining integrated. A community whose members comprise a wide range of temperaments, values, viewpoints, ways of expressing, etc., and still remain a unified people.

One way of defining complexity is as follows: complexification = differentiation + integration. Complexification is the process of evolution that all of nature is continuously undergoing, including you and me right now. All of us began as a single cell in our mother’s womb that differentiated over and over, while simultaneously integrating all of its differentiated parts into an increasingly complex whole. With each step in development (complexification), more degrees of freedom are added. A newborn baby does not have many options available to it. It lacks much agency. The role of the parent is to provide the constraints necessary to enhance that baby’s agency (to love, which enables choice). The child soon begins to move around, pick things up, crawl, walk, talk. As it develops, more of reality opens up to the child, enabled by the parents’ love. More generally, any context which enables the becoming of Creation can be said to embody love.

Beyond just images, there’s also a posture of the body that is enacted when I contemplate this notion of love. It’s to hold with an open palm. Love never seeks to control. It never forces anything, even good things. It only invites. This open holding, this pure, agenda-less attending from the heart, is a kind of celebration, and the celebration is itself a playful cultivating of the celebrated.