Is it possible to see love as just a “model”? Shouldn’t love be the underpinning of all you do? Shouldn’t it drive everything?

I say this to comment on the wording. When we say “love first”, what do we mean?

When I suggest love might drive everything, I am aware of how pompous that sounds. But…

…I am aware of how I try to allow love to drive my interactions, concepts like acceptance, tolerance, and non-violence form part of an understanding of how love might inform all I do.

But I am not very good at it, and part of me, the researcher/evaluator recoils at these wordings. Love is such a vague term. Which love are we talking of? The question is absurd.

Love is a braid: love for mother, for partner, for brother, for lover, for sister, for friend, for family, for human, for stranger, for soul, all informs all. Love is the whole.

But linguistically love is tenuous. Explain it without flourishes and it disappears, a slippery chimaera. It inhabits the limits of language, and is hard to rope into a “design” agenda/blueprint/schedule. So that sometimes when I see statements like “love first, design later” I get edgy, I look for my toys, for the edges of the pram….

But perhaps if you live it, love is part of the bedrock of your life, beyond agenda, beyond attitude. Which is what comes through in your post, Maha.

Love, Nick