I Love, Therefore I Am

Tao Writer (April 17, 1948 -)

I Love, Therefore I Am

My apologies to René Descartes, but when I look back on my life, more than the places I’ve travelled to and lived I remember most of all the people I love. No, that is not a grammatical error? I use the presence tense for love because I believe love never ends, it just sometimes changes form. It is love that provides me with the greatest adventures of my life on a daily basis. Although not always in an active form, but always in the form of loving “memories, dreams, and reflections.” Thank you C.G. Jung.

Xiaolu Guo, author of the book, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers, says:

Love,” this English word: like other English words, it has tense. “Loved” or “will love” or “have loved.” All these specific tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, Love is (ai). It has no tense, no past, no future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.

Love opens me to myself as well as to the beloved. For it is true, I must love myself before I can receive and return the love of another. From my adventures in love, I learned most of all that love is fulfilling the needs of the other person simple by being myself. That is a very important element. The giving of yourself to another and the acceptance of who you truly are by the other is one of life’s richest experiences. One can have all the outward adventures possible but until I open to myself, those trips become no more than pictures stored in boxes or on computer chips seldom taken out or looked at again. I have been formed and molded by the people whom I love and who love me. Love is the true adventure in this life.

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