Love takes the Long Way Home

At three in the morning, on the cold tile of my bathroom floor, I finally understood. Years of seeking love in perfect relationships, in spiritual practices, in helping others heal – all of it was me running from the very thing I was seeking. Like a fish swimming endless oceans searching for water, I had been looking everywhere except here, in this ordinary heart beating beneath my ribs.

It's funny how our deepest revelations often come when we've exhausted every other option. When I could no longer maintain the perfect spiritual persona, when I could no longer pretend I had it all figured out, when I could no longer avoid the ache of my own loneliness – that's when love finally caught up with me. Not as some grand mystical experience, but as a simple remembering: every moment of seeking had been love itself, looking for itself, through these human eyes.

Now when people ask me where to find love, I get very quiet. Because how do you tell someone that what they're looking for is what's looking? That the very ache of longing is proof that love is already here? Sometimes I point to their breath, to the way their heart breaks for others' pain, to the mysterious force that keeps them searching despite everything. And I share my own story not because it's special, but because it's so ordinary – this human journey of forgetting and remembering, forgetting and remembering, until one day we realize that even the forgetting was love, taking the long way home to itself.