Hope everyone is having a fantastic start to 2022. Cannot believe it is already Valentine’s Day, and seeing my sister put together cards for everyone in her class brought back memories from elementary school. Valentine’s day is a festival of love, and it got me thinking about what this 4-letter word, love, means and how much impact it creates in our lives each moment.

Recently with many young babies born in our family, I see unconditional love in a child with their mothers. A couple of weeks ago, it was my mom’s birthday, and it had taken me back down memory lane. When I was young, the only definition of love for me was possibly my mom, and that was the only thing I knew. There was nothing like love or hate, and there was possibly just the feeling of love without any conditions. After 16 years, there are so many different moods and things that happen throughout each day and while the word love comes up ample times in a day, does it still carry the true essence and emotion along with it?

We think of love whenever there is a happy moment in our life or when something happens the way we want it to happen, such as “I love you, Happy Birthday, Happy Anniversary, Happy Valentine’s Day, It’s a lovely day.” The moment our day starts, we begin to associate many things with words such as like or love. But when we are young, we have no idea what any of these words means such as love, hate, like, or dislike, and we only know the feeling without association to any word. It is this feeling, that we want to experience, and that is what brings joy in our life rather than the words.

A quote comes to mind that I had posted a couple of years ago and it said that “There is nothing like love or hate; there is only love more and love less.” I feel like that is all young babies know. They do not know what they hate, but they like some things more and others less. I remember that Rajen uncle once said that there are words, and there is experiencing the feeling of the word. As I have grown older, I surely know a lot more words, but the feeling behind the words is somewhere lost in the fast-paced world we live in.

Today as we celebrate Valentine’s Day, possibly two things we can do to celebrate is that we should not postpone experiencing this feeling of love any longer. And secondly, whenever we say the word love, we should pause afterward and try to differentiate between the word itself and its essence. While it is not Mother’s Day, for me this blog is dedicated to all the mothers out there as they are the closest definition of unconditional love that I know of.  Happy Valentine’s Day.