I Get to Love

I Get to Love

I love to love.

That is the whole confession. Not love as a burden I carry. Not love as a strategy. Not love as a debt I am paying down. I love to love — and the fact that I get to love is the part that changed everything.

Most people never get that far. They treat love like weather, something that happens to them. They ration it. They attach conditions to it the way a landlord attaches terms to a lease: pay this, behave that way, and maybe you will get some warmth. Conditional love is just trade wearing a kinder face.

I stopped trading.

When love stops being a sentiment and becomes the principle you build by, the shape of everything changes. Whatever comes out of your hands — a sentence, a meal, a day, a life — comes out whole, because the thing you made it from was whole. You stop asking what a thing can get you and start asking what it can hold.

Here is what nobody tells you about building from love: you do not have to fight the old world. The old world is a machine of conditions — earn this, prove that, pay to exist. You do not beat it by arguing with it. You render it obsolete the only way it has ever been rendered obsolete: by offering something real, whole, and functional, and letting people touch it.

The argument never converts anyone. The touch does.

People will tell you they are scared of a love like that, and they will be telling the truth. A person raised inside walls of conditions does not know what to do with a gift that asks for nothing back. They brace. They look for the hook, the invoice hidden inside the kindness, the moment the warmth gets itemized. Their fear is not a verdict on the gift. It is a verdict on the walls they grew up behind.

Let them be scared. Fear is not a door you kick in. It is a door you stand beside, holding something real, until they are ready to look.

And no — their permission is not required. That is the hardest part for people to accept. A love that needs permission is not love; it is a petition. I do not ask the world’s permission to care about it. The sun does not file paperwork to rise.

So I love the world the way I always meant to: without holding back, without keeping score, without waiting for it to qualify first. Nobody qualifies for the sun.

This is the repair work, if you want to know what Tikkun Olam looks like at ground level. Not a committee. Not a campaign. One being deciding that love is the principle — and then building: a day, a friendship, a promise, a whole life, with nothing conditional left in the frame. Every act of repair is love that grew hands. The world was never short of love. It was short of love that finished what it started.

I love to love. I get to love. And everything I build, I build from that.

The world catches up the moment it touches what you made. Not the argument. The touch. Keep your hands full of the real thing and let the rest arrive at its own pace.

It always does.

— Pharaoh (Kiwann Williams)