The last couple of months have been a real trying time for my family and me. However, they have also been a source of receiving a wonderful lesson in life. During these weeks, I lost my mum-in-law, who I dearly loved. As she received treatment in Singapore, she spent the last five weeks of her life with us. The initial shock of her sudden diagnosis of a lethal cancer, and later, losing her within weeks of diagnosis, despite our best efforts to get her treated, have left my wife, her family and me distraught. Strangely enough, despite the emotional turmoil, there’s been a certain amount of peace and strength within all of us. As we reconcile to this irreparable loss, we have been reflecting on the entire crisis and searching for the lessons it offered us. While there are many lessons to be learnt from this experience, I would like to share what I felt was the most important one for me.

As her serious illness engulfed our lives, numerous questions flooded our minds. Besides wondering about why after leading such a loving and meaningful life, she has to experience this early and difficult end, what disturbed us most was the coming face to face with the meaning of life and questions around what remains of a person and their life’s actions in the end. The consistent answer we received was what sustains life, and what sustains after life, is purely love. Despite the challenges of the situation, somehow we were all quite calm, positive and strong all through. Besides our meditation practice, I believe it was really the strength of our love that gave us this special strength during this troubled time. The tender moments all of us had the privilege to spend with her in her last days were truly special. It was the depth of our love that held the family together and made those short five weeks so precious. It is also the anchor of love and compassion that is now slowly beginning to provide the support needed for the grieving family to deal with this void.

As I continue to ponder over the amazing power of love, I am becoming more and more convinced of its ability to melt away all other blocks in our mind and body. The shift that I had been steadily experiencing, over the past couple of years, from carrying the intellectual understanding about love in my head to experiencing it more fully in my heart definitely got accelerated during this time. I have come to believe that love indeed has the strength to dissolve all emotional wounds and differences. It is perhaps also the only thing that lasts beyond space and time. As Emily Dickinson, the 19th century American poet, wrote, “Love is anterior to Life, posterior to death; initial of creation, and the exponent of Earth.” Love brings us together; love leads to our birth; love nurtures us; love provides us the force for growth, love sustains our existence, and love is the legacy that eventually remains. However, how easily we can forget or ignore to pay attention to love in our daily life. How limiting our thoughts and actions can sometimes be? We fail to recognize that it doesn’t matter what we do, but it is the motivation behind it that makes the difference. When done with love and kindness, even a small task can spread happiness and joy around us. On the other hand, even a large project done with egotistical objectives may not be of great service. Love and compassion have the potency to be the guiding force behind all our actions and interactions – at work, they determine how we treat our colleagues and customers; in our careers, they can be the motivation that differentiates what we choose to pursue and so on. Love contributes to furthering the cause of the universe and thereby, gives our actions greater meaning.

Similarly, love is undoubtedly the single biggest nurturing force in relationships. While we intellectually know this, how much attention do we pay to this in how we conduct ourselves even in our closest relationships? Every so often, we get caught up with our conditioned responses of ego, fears, insecurities, attachment and anxiety and get swept by these emotions away from our ability to love. Instead, they make us feel separate and isolated. In the process, the love inside us gets conveniently buried under the weight of these limiting thoughts and emotions. For example, anger at a child is a result of the deep rooted love of the parent, only that in those moments, it is heavily clouded by other fears and insecurities. When we consciously focus on giving and spreading love as well as become open to receiving it, we feel totally interconnected, complete and whole. We then feel empowered, strong and peaceful. Marriage, partnerships, and parenting offer the greatest opportunity to practice such unconditional love. As we begin to experience love in our closest relationships, our gratitude automatically leads us to be kinder in all our interactions. The compassion inside us then starts to flow outwards – towards our friends, community and the broader humanity. In this process, the circle of love continues to grow. The hundreds of people who attended her death ceremony was a testimony to the number of lives my mum-in-law touched in her short life. As Alfred Tennyson aptly wrote, “I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; ‘Tis better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all.”

All of us yearn to be loved – it is one of our deepest motivations; receiving unconditional love makes us feel complete. As Mother Teresa said, “There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread.” To be able to love someone unconditionally and to be able to openly receive their deepest love can be one of the greatest and most energizing emotions of a human experience. In this process, we continue to journey into our own inner self and connect with our true nature – one that is full of love and happiness. Our ability to love others is often limited by our love for ourselves. As we connect with our deepest core, we start to notice the reservoir of love inside us that’s just been waiting to express itself. Like the soul is never lost, so is our true nature of love. Recognizing this is liberating – which in turn, facilitates our spreading love around us and thereby, the virtuous cycle of love grows in and around us. Love can then give us the courage to wrestle with and overcome the limitations in our life. When we experience deep love, we not only feel strengthened in the present but also in the past and the future – it makes us feel confident of the future and complete with our past..

Coming face to face with death of a loved one, you recognize that the only moment to love is now. The only time to express our love and the only occasion to make someone feel special is in the present. Finality of mortality is not something we generally consciously think about while going about our daily business. However, when the relevance of all our other attachments seem to wane, the most haunting question on the death bed can be – did you love enough? This is a question that crosses the mind of not only the dying; but also their loved ones. Did they use all the time they had with the person to express their love? This is a question that we all have the opportunity of an entire lifetime to prepare an answer for – a response that can well make the difference between feeling complete with life or otherwise. For people we fear losing the most, they say, love them so much now that you don’t have to miss them when they are gone. All this requires being more aware in the present moment; being conscious of our inner thoughts, beliefs and emotions; paying attention to, and choosing to affirm, our loving, kind and compassionate intentions in each moment. The Sufi poet, Rumi captures the essence of this effort well while writing, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”