Maybe Love Is the Now

I have been thinking about love lately, and if there were one definition of it that really made sense to me, I used to think it would be time. The time you give to someone. Because when you think about it, time is probably the most valuable thing any of us has to give. You can give someone money and make that money again. You can buy another gift, replace almost anything. But if you spend an hour sitting with someone, that hour of your life is gone, and you will never get it back. For a long while, that felt like the whole answer.

Then I started thinking about something else. Is it really time? Because I am not sure time itself is real in the way we talk about it. Yesterday is already gone. Tomorrow is not here. The only thing we ever actually experience is Now.

And that changes the idea completely. Maybe love is not about giving people your time. Maybe it is about giving people your Now.

Think about what you mean when you say "I spent three hours with the people I love yesterday." What were those three hours, really? They were thousands of small Now moments — laughing, eating, arguing 😂, telling stories, sitting quietly, looking at each other. That is what actually happened. The three hours are only how we measured it afterwards.

Maybe that is why certain memories stay with us for the rest of our lives. Ask someone about their childhood and they will never tell you "my father spent approximately 4,000 hours with me." 😂 They tell you about moments:

We used to walk to the market together.

We used to sit outside after dinner.

He used to tell me stories.

Sometimes we would just sit there and talk about nothing.

Very simple things. Things that probably did not feel important while they were happening. But twenty or thirty years later, they are still there.

I think this is also why a child can struggle to feel attached to an absent parent. It does not mean that parent did not love them. Maybe they were working. Maybe they were sacrificing everything to provide for the family. Maybe life simply did not offer another choice. But a child does not understand any of that. A child understands presence — who was there, who listened, who played with me, who sat beside me when I was afraid, who laughed with me, who knew the stupid little things I liked. 😂 That is how a child experiences love, and honestly, adults are not so different.

Imagine someone you love sitting outside the house. You go and sit beside them, and they start telling you the same story you have already heard twenty times. 😂 You could take out your phone. You could think about work. You could tell yourself you will sit with them properly another day. Or you could just sit there, listen, laugh, ask questions, and let them tell it for the twenty-first time. The clock might say you gave them twenty minutes, but they did not receive twenty minutes.

They received you. Your attention. Your presence. Your Now.

Which brings me to the thing I keep circling back to: you can give someone your time without giving them your presence. You can spend a whole evening with someone you love while looking at your phone. You can live in the same house as someone and barely know what is happening in their life. You can visit the people you love while your mind is somewhere else — on work, money, problems, tomorrow. Technically you gave them your time. But did you give them you?

Maybe that is the whole difference. Love is not just being there. It is being there while you are there.

I think we start to understand this as we get older. When we are young we always assume there will be another day — I'll visit next month, I'll call tomorrow, when this project is finished I'll have more time, when I make enough money I'll spend more of it with the people I love. And this is the funny part. We work because we want money. We want money because we want freedom. We want freedom because we want time. And somewhere in the chase we forget to live with the people we were doing all of it for in the first place. Funny game, this life. 😂

I am not saying stop working. Of course not — we have responsibilities, people depend on us, we have dreams, and damn, life is expensive. 😂 I am only saying maybe we should stop postponing everything. If you can sit with someone you love, sit with them. If someone calls, sometimes let the conversation run longer than you planned. If a child wants to show you something completely useless, look at it. 😂 If a friend wants a beer, a coffee, a tea, or just to sit somewhere and talk nonsense, sometimes go.

Do not keep waiting for a perfect future where you finally have enough time, because that future, if it comes, will arrive exactly the way this moment arrived — as Now. Yesterday was once Now. Tomorrow, if we are lucky enough to see it, will also be Now. Our whole life is one Now becoming another Now.

So maybe when I say spend time with the people you love, what I really mean is: give them some of your Now. Sit with them. Listen. Laugh. Eat together. Argue sometimes. 😂 Tell stories. Sometimes do absolutely nothing at all. Because years from now, I suspect we will realise that the ordinary moments were the big ones.

And one day, when someone we love is gone, what we will wish for will not be more time. It will be one more moment — one more chance to sit beside them, to hear their voice, to laugh together.

One more Now.

This game of life is just a game ooh. Maybe we spend too much of it preparing to live later, while the only life we actually have is happening right now.