Love as a Way of Being

On how to learn how to love

To love is to not cling to memory: It is not to live off the residue of past pleasures or past hurt to interpret the other through yesterday’s lens. Love is alive only in the present moment and in the unfolding of the future. The instant it becomes a recollection, it hardens, loses its freshness, and turns into sentimentality or nostalgia.

Jiddu Krishnamurti often insisted that to see another human being clearly, one must be free of the burden of memory and judgment. Observation without rational evaluation is, in his words, the highest form of intelligence - and it is also the highest form of love. For love dies when we reduce the living person before us to an image we already (think we) know.

Here’s a practice:
Think of someone you are drawn to, someone who is drawn to you. Now try to look at them as if for the very first time. Refuse the pull of memory - the past quarrels, the old delights, the accumulated assumptions.
Notice instead what is here now: their presence, their gestures, their aliveness in this very moment. Familiarity breeds blindness, but freshness reveals life.
When you meet the other in this way, you open a doorway into a shared future rather than endlessly replaying the past.

But love is not only about seeing - it is also about giving. Erich Fromm, in “The Art of Loving”, reminds us that love is not primarily what we receive but what we are willing to give. To love is to act generously toward the life of another, to nurture their growth, to offer care, attention, sharing and understanding without calculating immediate returns.

This does not mean ignoring one’s own needs; rather, it means recognizing that meeting each other’s needs is itself a form of giving. It is a skill, an art, to discern what another truly requires and to offer it freely - not out of obligation, not as a transaction, but as a creative act of love. In this light, a relationship is not two people extracting from one another, but two people practicing the art of giving, again and again, in ways that keep the present alive and the future open.

The philosopher Jacob Needleman wrote that true relationship awakens us to meaning.
That awakening comes not when we ask, “What can I get?” but when we ask, “What can I give that allows the other to be more fully alive?”
The paradox is that in giving, we ourselves are enlarged.

To love, then, is to see with fresh eyes.
To love is to give without calculation.
To love is to step into the present with openness and into the future with trust.

And when we learn this practice, love becomes not a fleeting feeling, but a way of being.

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