Growth Happens at the Edge of Love

Where does this mysterious, numinous, elusive thing that we call “growth” come from? We crave it desperately. We hunger for it like the starving. And yet, when we do stumble upon it, it strikes us unawares, after the fact, creeps up on us somehow, and we cannot quite say how. Mostly, though we read the books and recite the affirmations, we remain maddeningly, frustratingly in the dark: blind to what “growth” truly is, or where it comes from. Thus, we struggle mightily and suffer needlessly. Not just at the superficial tasks of success, conquest, victory, but at the fundamental challenge of personhood: of creating and then living lives rich in meaning and brimming over with happiness.

Let me shine a light on this enveloping darkness. With a simple principle that you can always remember, and hopefully easily utilize.

Growth happens at the edge of love. And that is why we must first, always, foremost, live at the edge of love.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

The edge of love is when we are falling in love. Plunging pell mell, head over heels. We have lost control. Our rational minds, which are the smallest parts of us, no longer dictate our actions.

The edge of love cuts through us like the sharpest blade. It slashes through the skins of our selves and reaches into our truest being. Something deeper and truer in us finally awakens.

What is that mysterious “something”? A die-hard rationalist will tell you that it does not exist. And yet. The very moment that they fall in love, they will know something is more powerful and true than any cognition the mind can hold, any representation the theorizing self can act upon. Something more powerful in us and more essential to us than what we are taught is “us”. Yet, we cannot bottle it, measure it, quantify it, buy it, sell it–thus, we waste most of our lives pretending that the most deepest and truest part of us does not exist.  What is that elusive, evanescent “something”?

Let us answer the question backwards, so that we may truly understand it.

A well lived life is one in which we are always falling more deeply in love. Not anew. This is the first and greatest mistake many of us make. To seek new lovers, friends, jobs, careers, passions…and discard the “old” ones. But it’s not that easy, nor that simple. We rarely find the meaning we seek merely in the pursuit of novelty.

To always be falling in love means to ever be a little more consumed, overjoyed, astonished by, grateful for, worshipful of, devoted to, absorbed in what one is doing, being, living. If one’s great love is painting, to always fall in love means to find paintings to fall deeper in love with, to paint newer and truer art. If one’s great love is writing, to always fall in love means finding books that move and illuminate one ever more profoundly, to write things that one finds greater meaning in. If one’s great love is a person–as it should be–then always falling in love means ever seeing the truth of the person one loves more, ever recognizing and appreciating and celebrating who they truly are, a little more deeply every day.

It is a question of depth of experience and insight, not of quantity of possessions and memories.

That is what it means to live at the edge of love. To always fall in love is to ever be touched at a deeper and deeper level of one’s being, until at last one has broken the shell of the self wide open. And found what lies within and beneath and beyond it. Not just the “I”–but the “all”. The recognition that one’s self has no true meaning, form, purpose, essence at all–until and unless it becomes a self which can hold the fullness of life within it.

What does that seemingly mystical statement mean?

When one’s spirit dwells at the edge of love, so one is, at last, growing–and finally, one can know what growth truly means. When we live at the edge of love, our truest and greatest strengths are what are growing. Our capacities for empathy, wisdom, insight, rebellion, grace, forgiveness, mercy, truth. All these and more. They are what give our life meaning.

And that is all that we really mean by the mysterious and overcomplicated and awkward word “growth”. It is a shame that it’s such a cold word, with overtones not of health, but illness, aggrandizement, gain, hoarding. That is what we often confuse it for, and that is why we often fail at it entirely.

The truth is that it is the wrong word to convey all the ideas above. What must grow is our spirits. Our capacities to live more fully, truly, wholly. The key word there is not just spirit, but must. If we do not grow, then we feel as if we are dying a little bit. We grow angry, resentful, depressed, anxious, obsessed–self and other destructive. The truth is that we feel so because we are dying a little bit. Not materially–for the death of the body is less than we often suppose–but in a truer sense: spiritually, mentally, existentially. Every living thing must grow if it is to become whole. Human beings are no different. But our growth is not merely of the material or social kind, but of the existential and spiritual kind. The growth that we truly desire and need is of the spirit, the heart, and the self–it is the growth of being. Our ability to be. To exist not merely as instruments, doings, events, consumers, victims, targets–but to be: actors, agents, rebels, dreamers, lovers, defiant and dauntless authors of lives that matter.

That is why we must live at the edge of love. If we do not, we will always feel that the world is a cold, meaningless, calculating machine. Set upon destroying, exploiting, diminishing us. In which we have no home, place, belonging, reason to live. That may be true of the institutions men make and call “the world”. But it is not true of the world of being, the world in which we must learn to be truly born. That world, should we voyage into its truest heart, is not merely desperate ruin, conquest, bitter defeat, ruthless competition. It brims over with meaning, shines incandescent with grace, echoes with fulfillment.

We learn to find our way home when we live at the edge of love. We grow into the people we were meant to be when we devote ourselves to always falling in love.

Let us then reject the cry of the cynic, the call of the demagogue, the taunt of the antagonist. Not merely those outside us–but those within us. We must learn to awaken in us the selves which may hold not just the “I”–but the “all”. Selves which contain all the  rebellion, grace, mercy, forgiveness, wisdom, truth, courage–all the human possibility–that our brief time on earth holds. That is all that growth is. And only the edge of love can awaken those selves. Love cuts through the skin of what we superficially cling to, crave, hunger for, desire–and reveals what the beings that we may, should, and can become.

Our first and fundamental challenge, if it is fulfillment that we seek, the fullness of becoming who we truly are, is to live at the edge of love.