i mean, i sincerely hope you don’t. i would hope that you have love for them completing the program, but they’re deserving of your love beyond having completed their degree program. because there’s so much more than that. so much more to love. like, the struggles you confided in each other, your shared history and inside jokes, how they listen so intently when you speak, and you to them, maybe even that they remember how you like your tea. remember how the light reflected off their hair? they didn't even notice how beautiful they looked. they were too preoccupied with something else to notice but i’m sure they thought they same for you, at another time. it's love. we feel it before we know it. four loves is a nice model, but there's so much more than that.

that we believe in types of love is to make separate the context in which love can arise. love for family, love for friends, love for romance, love for god. this separation implies that each type of love refers to a different concept, but despite all we try to categorize it, reify it, love is more abstract than that.

separating love into categories feels wrong to me. love for friends versus love for family; for what reason? what of love for strangers or love for acquaintances or love for colleagues? the separation feels only adequate to communicate a measurement of emotional volume. we love family more than we love friends more than we love colleagues more than we love acquaintances more than we love strangers. but love — the emotion we’re contacting — exists independently of the amount we allow ourselves to feels for other people.

but surely there's a real, categorical difference between the emotion elicited by spirituality, friendship, affection, and romance? you can pray for a friend's safety without loving the action that requires your prayer, love a friend for their company and never want to bed them, bed somebody you couldn't call a friend. call it all love, if you must. love and pray for your friend that they may break into the industry after having earned their bachelor of arts, love your friend for having witnessed them grow in a parallel path, love their absence as much their presence, and if ever the time is right then love one another with a tender touch. but all these categories of love signify the same thing, whatever that thing may be. i call it love. and a degree has nothing to do with it.

i don’t remember what it was like to be a baby. but i remember the transition away from being a baby, into being a part-fledged thinking and conscious child. the transition was scary. it was my foray into the world of symbols. no longer were my experiences full-bodied felt senses, but felt-senses explained by symbols. and before i knew it, the symbols were dominant and thoughts became words, words with limitations. i lost contact with that world of felt senses.

i envy dogs. look into their eyes and be lost in a world of felt senses. they exude love. they have no capacity for symbols. play a video of dogs barking on the tv, and your dog will bark, having no understanding of the screen or the speakers that mimic a false reality. it’s as real to them as any treat. so what of us? are we any better off for saying, silly dog, that’s not real, that’s a symbol on a screen, a symbol through the speakers; those are representations of real dogs that existed at some other place, at some other time.

and yet, still we confuse symbols for reality. our symbols exist in the abstract, in our every insecurity. i wish i were more attractive; i wish i had more friends; i wish i were smarter; i wish i was someone important. as if there’s any good reason to be anyone other than who you are right now, because you are you, and you are more concrete and real than any abstraction that you wish you were. but, the you that wishes to be something more, that’s precious too. that wish will guide you. just take care that you’re guiding yourself to the right place. i hope, to where the love is.