What we choose to love

What we choose to love determines who we are and who we are becoming.

The principle of agency – that you are free to make your own choices – is perhaps the most fundamental in the human universe. When it comes to spirituality, interpersonal relationships, happiness, nearly everything – agency keeps cropping up as a key element to understanding the way we humans  and our world work.

Nowhere, perhaps, is this more evident than in one crucial decision: choosing what to love.

When I say “love” I don’t just mean in romance. I mean it generally – the way Jesus meant it when he cautioned us about what we treasure: “for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

This crucial choice – what to love – is all the more important because it’s one of the most subconscious things we do.  Few of us can remember the moment when we decided to love the things we do. Our likes and dislikes are almost so natural to us that they don’t seem like choices at all.

But they are. And really, to be fair, I’m talking about more than just simple preferences. I may like chocolate ice cream more than other flavors, for instance. That’s a mere preference. Loving something implies something more. It requires making a real space in your heart, in your mind, in your life. Something you love is something you are willing to make sacrifices to accommodate.

To love is to give a part of yourself, of your heart, to something or someone else. It means to care. Most people would probably say the opposite of love is hate. It isn’t. Love and hate are actually opposition pairs (for more on the subject, see my earlier post on hope and fear). The opposite of love is not hate, but apathy: the state of being where you  couldn’t honestly care less. Whether something or someone prospers, does well, lives or dies, makes no difference to you. When you love you are choosing to care. You are engaging your heart in behalf of, because of, in the service of, something or someone else.

The choice to love is thus a supreme gift. In fact, it is the thing of greatest value that we flawed, weak humans have to give precisely because it is completely ours to give. No one can force us to care. The decision to engage one’s heart is truly made independently. And, as such, it speaks volumes about who we really are.

In this moment of agency each one of us, free and independent, chooses what to set our hearts on. This choice is profoundly consequential. It determines who we are and who we are becoming.

This is crucially important because there is so much in this world to love. Much of it is not at all worthy of the sacred space we give it in our hearts. Some of the rest is so worthy it would transform our lives if we would only give it room to grow.

By now I have hopefully convinced you that what we love is truly a choice – if at times a subconscious one. But have I convinced you that what you choose to love determines who you are and who you are becoming? Where do I come off making that potent claim?

Quite simply, by thinking about God and what he loves, and who he is. Job said it perfectly: “who is man that you should set your heart upon him?” As incredible and unexplainable as it may seem, God has decided to set his heart on us. What objective reason is there to explain why he chose, of all things, to love you and me? None. It was simply a choice he made long, long ago, and which he will never back down from.

Indeed, it was God’s decision to love you and me that made him who he is. It was the defining moment of his identity as our God. He is, quite simply, the one who cares. His love for us has permeated his being to the extent that it defines him.

In an analogous – but much less perfect – way, what we choose to love and make space for in our hearts permeates our lives and defines who we are. And it is entirely fitting and proper that it should be so. For we are the masters of our own hearts. The halls of our hearts are inviolate. Not even God will enter that sacred space uninvited. And it is there, from within that sanctuary, that our fate is decided, that our destiny is forged.

Apart from his unexplainable choice to love us (probably the first axiom of the universe), the greatest gift of God is our freedom (probably the second). And with it, we are capable, through this principle, of becoming whoever and whatever we want to be. The sky is truly the limit, for on the one hand we can choose to love only ourselves, becoming small, lonely and miserable; while on the other hand there is the ultimate example of Jesus Christ, the one who chose to care about every one else – about you and me – and who became, over the course of his life, our God – like his Father. If we want to be like him, the path is simple: we have to choose to care about others.

While mulling this over, I imagined a conversation between a disciple of Christ, at the end of his life, and the Savior. The disciple says, “the decision I made to love you and to care about the things you care about changed my life. My decision to care about you and your work changed me and made me who I am today.” And Jesus replies, “yes, indeed – and my decision to love you made me who I am: your Savior, the one who chose to care.”

The aching void we struggle to fill

There’s a pernicious link between loneliness and weakness, between emptiness and vice.

I like to explain it through one of the hallmarks of classical physics: the noble gas law. This law declares that pressure is a function of the amount of stuff, the space it’s crammed into, and the temperature of the stuff.

An easy way to think of it is to visualize a house party. If there’s a ton of people in one part of the house and other rooms in the house are empty, people are bound to move from the hot, packed place into the cooler, vacant rooms. But if the other rooms in the house were equally crowded and hot, then people wouldn’t be rushing into them, would they? There would likely be, on average, as many people moving out of them as into them.

It’s the same with gases, and in fact physicists first discovered the law that stuff flows from high density to low studying them. But the principle also applies, more abstractly, to the human mind.

When the mind, the heart, the soul, is empty, the “pressure” within is really low, right? When that’s the case, there’s no telling what kind of stuff will come rushing in: thoughts, ideas, feelings, wishes, hopes, fears. Some you may want, most you probably don’t. Nature abhors a vacuum. When a space is empty, there is enormous pressure from without to fill it.

Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to shore up the walls of my mind against a high-pressure outer world whose contents are constantly trying to rush in and fill up the lonely space.

The hardest part, though, is that no one likes to feel empty. Not only are the thoughts, feelings, ideas, and fears that come rushing in often pernicious and harmful, but the emptiness itself is awful. We have all known that feeling to some degree or another: loneliness. It’s a hollow ache, a crater at the center of your being. It’s cold, black silence is deafening. None of us can stand it for long. We crave, we yearn, we ache for that void to be filled. In many ways, I think this is the fundamental human urge. Facing that emptiness is agonizing.

This is the theme of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. The creature Frankenstein creates was not always evil, but isolation and loneliness turned him slowly into a monster.

Because we can’t long endure the emptiness, before long we readily welcome anything that will fill it. It’s simple physics – holding off the outside cacophony of influences, noises, thoughts, ideas, and emotions, all to preserve an aching loneliness, is fighting a losing battle.

So much of what we fill our lives with is just that – filler. It isn’t what we really want to be there – it’s just what happened to rush in when we finally gave up trying to hold the fort. This is really a tactic of distraction, of numbing, designed to keep the mind occupied so as not to remember that what we’ve filled our hearts with is not what we’re truly yearning for.

What we’re truly yearning for is connection, belonging. We want to know where, with whom, we belong. And we want to connect with those people deeply, to know they love us without a shadow of a doubt. And to have the privilege of loving them back.

Unfortunately, true connection is one of the hardest things in the world to cultivate. So, impatient, lonely, and in pain, we substitute true connection with temporary pleasures. We tell ourselves that we’re fine and all but give up hope of finding the real thing. And in the mean time, the once temporary pleasures take root and refuse to leave. And if we do manage to banish them, the empty hollowness they leave in their wake creates a terrible loneliness. So we’re back where we started, struggling for connection; and before long the temporary pleasures have returned fill the hole.

This process – the filling of our empty souls with counterfeits – has been known to humanity since the dawn of time. Greek mythology tells of a man with a hunger that could not be satisfied. He ate everything he could find and yet hungered. In the end, consumed by his emptiness, he devoured the only thing left: himself.

An ancient prophet once taught, “do not spend your money for that which is of no worth, nor your labor for that which cannot satisfy.” Similarly, Jesus said to the woman at the well, “whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again; but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst.”

Similar truths are taught in Buddhism. Buddhists believe that everything in the physical world – everything you can touch, taste, smell, hear, or see – is in fact hollow. It isn’t real, and the fact that our physical senses can interact with the hollow world is little more than an illusion of the mind. In fact, the only things in the world that are real cannot be seen. Peace, joy, love, connection – these things are real, solid; they can fill the soul, satisfy the aching loneliness.

I’m reminded of  what the fox teaches the little prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s fabulous little book: “anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”

Battling loneliness, striving for connection, is one of the most desperate, important battles many of us will ever fight in this life. We need to learn to hold the chaotic world at bay long enough to find, to invite in, to cultivate, what we truly long for. And we need to summon the courage to tell ourselves (and perhaps some of our friends and loved ones, too) that filling a void with hollow things leaves you just as empty as before. Only now you’ve got thistles, weeds, and maybe even baobabs, growing in your heart.