Love It Or Leave It
Love is a verb
Do you love your job?
I’m not talking about the “It’s 100% rosy 100% of the time” love or the “if you love your job, you never work a day in your life” love. That’s the feeling of love. I’m talking about the action of love. You love your job by continually investing in your job, for the betterment of yourself and everyone around you.
I don’t describe myself as loyal. Being loyal is too passive for my blood, and it’s too far reaching. Loyalty connotes blind faith. No thanks. Instead, I describe myself as committed. That’s far more active of a role. I’m actively investing in my work, and I’m regularly assessing my situation as objectively as possible to determine if it’s sufficiently a net positive for myself and for my coworkers.
Move beyond “my job is a paycheck” to the reality of your job being a relationship. You have a set of relationships that vary in connected strength. Your job counts as one of these relationships as well. All of your relationships are living things, that need to be regularly nourished. Loyalty’s answer to, “Why further this relationship?” is simply, “Because.” Commitment’s answer to the same question is, “Because of all the strength of that relationship.” As you keep investing in a relationship, it gets harder and harder to discount it. “Dis-count” as in “reduce in value” or “measure incompletely”.
Love is a verb
There are three relevant quotes that beautifully set the stage here (bolding mine).
Stephen Covey: “Love is a verb. Love – the feeling – is the fruit of love the verb or our loving actions.”1
Jordan Peterson: “Keep the relationship alive. Living things die, after all, without attention.”2
Scott Peck: “My feelings of love may be unbounded, but my capacity to be loving is limited. I therefore must choose the person on whom to focus my capacity to love, toward whom to direct my will to love. True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision.”3
My synthesis of these three is, “I have an infinite capacity to love, but a finite time in which to demonstrate that love.” This focuses my efforts and puts me in a “love is as love does” mindset. Now let’s talk about all your different loves.
