Love and Fear
“Fearlessness is what love seeks… Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”
“Love, but be careful what you love,” the Roman African philosopher Saint Augustine wrote in the final years of the fourth century. We are, in some deep sense, what we love — we become it as much as it becomes us, beckoned from our myriad conscious and unconscious longings, despairs, and patterned desires. And yet there is something profoundly paradoxical about such an appeal to reason in the notion that we can exercise prudence in matters of love — to have loved is to have known the straitjacket of irrationality that slips over even the most willful mind when the heart takes over with its delicious carelessness.
This is just the introduction to Mario Popova's brilliant article about Hannah Arendt on Love and How to Live with the Fundamental Fear of Loss.
I won't attempt much new thinking this late in the day and just point towards this source. I won't be any smarter than Saint Augustine or Hannah Arendt today. Still felt like sharing this connection of these themes.