I’m starting my very first blog entry for Sketching Life on Napkins with a bold statement: I can define love.

I can’t define love psychologically, philosophically, spiritually, or any other standard way, but I can define it in terms of flows, boundaries, and bonds.

Here’s a stab at it:

Love is the inner feeling and outward expression associated with the flow of information, matter, and energy between people.

Feelings and expressions, when reciprocated, increase feedback. Feedback results in bonds. Bonds result in new human systems. Human systems are required for our survival.

Love is a genetic gift. It’s in our DNA. It’s a built-in incentive, the icing on the cake in the creative formation of human systems—individuals, marriages, friendships, communities, families, countries.

Love is the inner feeling and the outer bodily expression that encourages us, inspires us, and sometimes drives us to bond even more. It hurts when flows between people aren’t reciprocated, when the feedback doesn’t reinforce our feelings, and when we sense it but another doesn’t. We want to love.

I can’t describe love with old industrial thinking and its machine metaphors—more about that some other day. From that worldview, love is the purview of poets.

From a systems view, all is process. From a systems view, love is far from abstract. Love is real.

It’s like Aristotle asking, “What is air?” He just didn’t have the science. We are just beginning to have the science for love.

Meanwhile, it’s clear that there is only one way to get more love: Open to the flow.

Make sense?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 11:53 am and is filed under Emotions, Feedback, Flows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.