Is there love in it?

This week a single line from a novel has been following me around, through meetings, past things I've already put out into our world, into the quiet afterward. It named something I've felt for years without clean words for it: that what you make, say, or stand for can be skillful, profitable, well-received, even admired, and still leave you feeling strangely empty standing next to it.

The line is from Allen Levi's Theo of Golden. One of his characters says it plainly: “for anything to be good, truly good, there must be love in it. If love is not in it, at the very heart of it, it might be skillful, marketable, or popular, but I doubt it is truly good. Nothing is what it's supposed to be if love is not at the core.” What stopped me wasn't the idea that love makes things nicer. It's that he puts love at the centre as the thing itself, and everything we usually measure, the polish, the numbers, the reception, as decoration around it. A whole culture can be built to optimize for skillful, marketable, and popular, and never once ask the question that actually decides whether any of it is good.

You'll know by the feeling. The hollowness that shows up next to work that performed well isn't a flaw in you, or tiredness, or some failure of gratitude. It's the part of you that still knows what good is, refusing to be fooled. So here's the question I'd carry this week:

Where in what you're putting into the world right now is there love at the core, and where have skillful, marketable, and popular quietly been standing in for it?

We keep calling that emptiness the price of doing serious work. What if it's just the sound of the love we left out?

Mentioned: Book - 'Theo of Golden' by Allen Levi →