When we go out in public, we tend to treat some interactions as crucial and some interactions as trivial. You pick up the call from your mom, but you brush off the barista’s attempt to connect with you. When we treat interactions as hierarchical–labeling some as better than others–we only invite pain. When we prioritize one interaction over another, we risk losing what we want or gaining what we don’t want. We get caught up in wanting things to be one way instead of accepting things how they are. We harden ourselves to the fluidity of life’s course, imagining ourselves as concrete pillars instead of soft caramel.

You are married to everyone. Every single person you interact with should experience the gentle caress of your deepest love. What would happen if you treated the barista’s interaction as the last interaction you were to have on Earth? If you gave this interaction all your attention, time, and love, how could you walk out of the small talk feeling anything other than fulfilled?

The love we have is for the world. It’s not just for the ones we love most, or the ones we want to love us most, but for the entire web of human interactions. Living out love means a couple of concrete things.

1. Every experience you have brings some level of meaning to your life. Whether this person is giving you your morning coffee or filing a paper to the government on your behalf, the jobs that we do in relation to other people is crucial work. It’s the invisible web that connects us all. You may not sense the cosmic significance of a daily coffee handoff from barista to businesswoman, but it is this small kindness that in aggregate reveals the tender nature humans have at their core. You are part of a thriving web of joy.
2. You love through the fear of loving. Scared is just a misinterpretation of sacred. As Joseph Campbell said, “It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life.” The joy of living does not come to the person who is too scared to love. In this life, we must live wholly with hearts open to the love we want to receive. If we can’t do that, we risk living a life constricted and empty of meaning.
3. Tenderness sets you apart from everyone else in your life. The joy of tenderness is greeting every situation like it is the only thing you have to do in the world. Tenderness is an acknowledgement of the fragility of a situation paired with the attempt to help circumvent pain for others. Tenderness is gently teaching your brother about a concept he knows nothing about. You acknowledge that your brother doesn’t have all the knowledge he might wish he had, but you are there to guide him through it with grace and love.
4. You seek to understand, not to be right. We don’t see the world as it is; we see the world as our emotions see the world. In every interaction, there are a few pieces of information that, if disclosed, would change the interaction entirely. When I argue with you about never having enough shrimp on the dinner table, the argument is not about shrimp. The underlying feelings could be not feeling secure at work and wanting to have security at home; feeling shame for having a large appetite; or feeling worried about your partner’s affection, the shrimp being a sign they don’t love you as much as you love them. People don’t disclose these things because they don’t know they’re there until they’re asked to examine them. When you seek to understand, you escape this toxic trap.
5. You remember that everyone is fighting a battle. This is not a new idea, but there’s an under-appreciated corollary: some are fighting small battles and others are fighting the biggest battle of their lives. Because of this, we need to be cautious with our words. We need to meet every moment with an everlasting okay-ness. If we don’t, we become what we dislike in others: careless, blind to others’ emotions, selfish. Treat the people around you with a gentleness that you’d reserve for a sick kitten. People will notice.

Living out love is a quiet brilliance that fills in others’ cracks with kindness. It takes humility, dedication, and a healthy reflection on your own attitude toward superiority. It’s not easy because the people we exist in with the world are not easy. But beneath the difficulty of this task is the opportunity to treat someone as though they were the last person on Earth–the only person who deserves your full and honest attention. When people become the subject of that loving-attention beam, they are reborn through their flaws. They rise to meet you where you are. Genuine love makes the world easier to live in because people are more receptive to others.

At the end of our lives, we will measure ourselves against the good and bad deeds we did for others. We owe it to ourselves and the world to live out love, undergirding our world as a promise upheld.