All You Need is Love...

A new friend (@Miridunn) shared a compelling quote on her Twitter page today:  "The world feeds lust and lets real love starve." - Paul Potts  My response to her was, "The world is obsessed with lust, and most certainly because they do not recognize love."

We turn on the news in the morning or the evening and are bombarded with stories of crimes committed in cold blood...we often turn off the television thinking to ourselves that the world is getting worse every day. We allow ourselves to become desensitized and disillusioned about life, love, the meaning of family, friendship, faith, and the list could go on.  What we fail to see because we have been programmed not to notice it as much is all of the love that surrounds us.  We fail ourselves by not taking even a mere five minutes out of our day to look at the people around us and witness real acts of love.

I chose to take this five minutes today and make it a gift of love for myself.  I took time to notice things I would not have noticed otherwise had I not had a purpose behind my quiet sitting.  I told myself, "Open eyes, close mouth."  The couple sitting on my right could not keep their hands off each other, and I lost count of their seemingly endless kisses.  After tending his tables, my waiter kept walking over to the girl behind the counter and tenderly touching her swelling tummy, so happy for the life growing inside of her.  A Harold-and-Maude couple came in, arms around each other as if they would never hold each other again.  He kept his eyes on her and I wondered if I even saw him blink.  She asked him if her Indian headdress was a little much for the restaurant, and he confidently reassured her that no one else would dare to wear such a piece because no one would be able to pull it off the way she did.  After I had paid my bill and started my walk to my car, the girl behind the counter told me to have a great day, I wished her the same, and she responded by saying that she appreciated me saying so.  I decided has exceeded by five minute allocation for observing love in whatever forms I would come across, and satisfied by this time I had spent, began my drive home.  I then realized I could not stop with the experiment.  I was looking in car windows, observing interactions in parking lots, watching people walking out of stores or standing in line at the snow-cone stand.  There is so much love in the world to see if you focus on it.  I renewed my faith in love today.  I renewed hope in my heart.  I will give this to myself every day from now on.

Five minutes...five minutes is long enough to turn a day around and kindly remind you as John Lennon so perfectly penned, "All You Need is Love."

Find love others, find love in yourself.  Love yourself because you have to live with yourself for the rest of your life. ;)  Share it and see it multiply.