The engine, turned inward

I’m gonna be blunt with y’all. I wasn’t in the best spot in early 2025. I’d recently moved to Dallas from Boston for work, barely knew anyone in all of Texas, and was already missing my friends back in Boston. Then, shortly after, came a breakup, the toughest of my life.

I’ve always tried to show goodwill and “be a good person.” But if I’m honest, the engine was mostly pointed at work. This time was different, because a few conditions happened to superimpose. I was alone. Gosh, even lonely. I had no distractions. I was doing fine financially. And, as always, I was curious: curious enough to start excavating pieces of information, from myself and from my environment, that might help me know me better. Notice the pressure on “me.”

I found this sign interesting at the time, even if its meaning was still a little vague to me.

So I kept excavating. I learned more about myself, hit the gym religiously, meditated, finished one book after another, all while revving at work. I kept more or less the same ingredients but played with the recipe, adding or dropping something here and there (cut meditation, picked up golf). I stayed productive “outside of work” too, because staying productive was the only thing that felt “right.”

Fast forward roughly 18 months. A few hours ago, I finished Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. Almost every line hit home. (Except a few, see here.)

Here’s what landed. All those conditions, which, honestly, were never really separate from one another, had converged at once, and I’d quietly turned that engine inward to fix a few things. I just didn’t have words for it until this book: whenever I brought all four pillars of “love” to something, that thing became loved by me, whether or not it loved me back.

• Care — active investment in its flourishing.
• Responsibility — freely responding to what it actually needs.
• Respect — seeing it as it is, on its own terms.
• Knowledge — understanding it from the inside.

I don’t want to spoil the book for you, so I’ll leave you with just one line from it:

If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody else, “I love you,” I must be able to say, “I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.”

By the way, that picture up above literally alternated between two states:

Back in April 2025, I couldn’t have told you why it stuck with me. I think I can now. Love, the kind those four pillars build, isn’t a destination you reach. It isn’t the falling, either. It’s a state you live in, an act of becoming. Now is always the time for it.