Where you invest your love, you invest your life.
This lyric from a Mumford & Sons song attracted my imagination the moment I heard it again recently.
It speaks to the things and people we deeply care for shape our lives and become a core part of our identity and purpose.
It suggests that who and what we love is where we devote our time, attention, and resources. The priorities we set through our loving attachments become our life's work and focus.
When we love something - a cause, a person, an institution - we intrinsically bind our wellbeing to it. Its fate becomes our fate, its struggles become our struggles, and its successes we share in.
Love is an active verb and force that drives action. Loving isn't passive, but an investment of self that leads to poured out time, energy, worry, sacrifice, and commitment in order to nurture and support the beloved.
Our greatest loves become integrated with our life's meaning and labors. What captures the heart directs the legs and hands. Or as an alternate phrasing could put it: "What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the hands and feet follow after." The things and people we love most steer the ship of life.
