1: Scientists believe love is an emotion.
Love is “the micro-moment of warmth and connection that we share with another living being,” Barbara Fredrickson writes in her book Love 2.0: Creating Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection.
Yesterday, we explored how we can be intentional about amplifying the love we experience in our deepest and most important relationships.
Understanding this reality, we can choose to create more moments of warmth and connection with the people we love and care about. When we do so, we take advantage of the previously missed opportunities to connect.
2: But this strategy is not confined to those with whom we share a deep and lasting connection.
“Ordinary, everyday exchanges with colleagues and strangers now light up and call out to us as opportunities—life-giving opportunities for connection, growth, and health, our own and theirs,” Barbara notes.
We can sync up with someone we’ve just met just as we can with our spouse or a close friend.
The emotion of love, then, becomes possible in any human connection.
“The scientific understanding of love and its benefits offer us a completely fresh set of lenses through which to see our world and our prospects for health, happiness, and spiritual wisdom,” Barbara writes.
3: Our eyes now open, we can see what we missed before.
“It is love, after all, that energizes that unspoken bond of sameness we sense between us and the person by chance seated next to us on the plane, to whom we’ve opened up and listened attentively, in that moment when we glance at each other and really see each other, with true respect and appreciation.”
When this occurs, we “feel united, connected, of a piece. When we especially resonate with someone else—even if we’ve just met—the two of us are quite literally on the same wavelength, biologically.”
This concept is “neither abstract nor mediated,” Barbara writes. “True connection is physical and unfolds in real time.”
More tomorrow.
_______________________
Reflection: What opportunities do I have today to connect with the people I encounter?
Action: Do it.
What did you think of this post?
