When we lose someone through death or divorce, through the gaps in the current, it’s the gap that causes physical sadness and discomfort. We create the gap by cutting off our feelings, which is what we think we must do in order to prevent suffering. Paradoxically, the solution is to embrace our feelings. Otherwise, we are grieving for their absence.

Sorrow when there’s sorrowing to be done, or you’ll come to regret it. One day, you’ll find yourself hard put to squeeze out a tear.

“Love lost” is a misnomer. Love is never lost. It’s a steady vibration, a pulse that rings through the blood of even the most reprehensible criminal. Just as we spontaneously open our hearts to a small child, or a baby animal, we are meant to receive all of life.

Joy, thanksgiving for joy! A thankful heart is an open heart.

In a way, love is life itself, and it should be ordinary. The mystification of love is a formula that is poisoning life on Earth. One villain is a cult of numbers, the insidious measuring and comparing of the immeasurable and incomparable.

The bias for having rather than being, pseudo-materialism that has engulfed classical knowledge, also recasts the character of the human heart. Dante’s all-powerful “love that moves the Sun and the Stars” was high jacked by the merchant mind. Our humanity was leveraged, “traded up,” and love became booty.

Remember King Midas. In wishing that everything he touched would turn to gold, Midas forgot what he most valued – until he reached for his little daughter and embraced a statue. (Interesting, isn’t it, that we still speak of “the Midas touch” as something to be envied?)

“When you care enough to send the very best.” “Diamonds are forever.” “Nothin’ says lovin’ like somethin’ from the oven.”

Is it fair, then, to shut out people and causes that “don’t pay”? “Three strikes and you’re out” and “I gave at the office”?

If scheming brought us to this point, we might take a moment from our schemes to save the world. But too often we find ourselves scheming on behalf of our ideals. Visionaries are not immune to this dysfunction. There is always a temptation, for example, to overstate our case, or gloss over the weak points. We want to trick the power-mongers into sharing power!

Here is a formula for an open life and an open heart, and there are no exceptions. It is the universal solvent.

Humble yourself before God and confess your sins.

Make up your mind to rectify them.

Swear your allegiance to yourself and this agenda, no matter what appealing side trips there may be. If you can’t follow yourself, why should anyone else?

Anyone who has put his foot firmly to Earth, in pursuit of a higher well-being, knows that the way is fraught with distractions. Only those who come to discern these will succeed in their causes. Thus, the formula. Don’t seek love–seek purpose. Purpose doesn’t smooth the way. It sometimes takes us to the lion’s den or into icy waters, but it forms a backbone and gives form to the formless. In a funny way, things start to make more sense—to ourselves, at least, if not to others.

Purpose is the fairy godmother that lifts our sense of self from the mundane to the regal. It transforms our ups and downs into a saga worthy of the ancients, the great game, an odyssey. The vision that first animates us is a magnet, a message from the amorphous future. As we move toward it in our own way—plunging ahead, stumbling at times, recovering, sometimes soaring—we have a mysterious sense that something more is at stake. Is the purpose the carrot that lures our donkey selves--, our egos perhaps, to undertake an arduous journey? The skill we most need, monitoring every moment—radical common sense—perceives the true and subtle. “Truth is beauty, and beauty, truth,” Keats wrote. Our awe and gratitude open the floodgate of our natural sympathies. If we perceive what is, and not what is predicated, our vision inspires.