ACT OF THE WILL

“Love is not primarily an emotion, but an act of the will.”—Bishop Robert Barron
 
                There are many days I don’t feel love, not in the way most often imagined.  I don’t wake, heart aglow with passion or elation for another.  As years pass, people and passions change.  It’s not what it was when it was young and new, and there are times I wonder on my chosen path, but those questions don’t matter.  History is written.  Only the future can be changed—because it is not made.
                Every day, we are given the decision to love: not to feel.  We either feel or we don’t, but such holds no bearing on our decision to love—to give of ourselves from selflessness and care for another irregardless of love idealized in romance, movies, and literature.  The love of this sort is an infatuation, and if it is where our hearts and eyes forever seek, it will remain fleeting, ephemeral, and our hearts will feel alone in the end. 
                Love is many ways, and we all live it as we’re able, when we’re willing.  Sometimes it is giving of ourselves, what we do to help another.  Sometimes it is what we decide to let go: forgiveness for times we’re hurt, choosing to love another despite past pains, deciding someone is more important than a past already written; however painful, hurtful, or upsetting it may have been. 
                Maybe love is foolish, but I’d rather be a fool than wise without it.  Many days, I’m not happy, but I choose to love, and in giving and sacrificing for another—even when it hurts—often I feel better.  Other times I just feel foolish.  Maybe there is truth in both of these effects. 
                I wish I had the idealized love, the one of emotion, but I know it’s incomplete and cannot sustain itself forever.  Even when I do not feel the ideal, I will live the deeper love—love of the will—and do my best to manifest it every day.  I will choose to love, not because I feel it, but because I wish it to exist.  I shall will it in my acts until it’s expressed in living form.  I will live it.  I will give it, even when I do not feel that it is there. 
                By this, we make love real.

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