Love can be a great motivator.

For Daniel Kablutsiak, the love for his son was the push he needed to lose a staggering 79 pounds. 

The stakes for his weight loss were high; if Kablutsiak could lose the extra pounds, he’d have the chance to give his son a more normal teenage life.Slimming down meant that the father would be able to be an organ donor for 16-year-old Hunter, who was diagnosed with stage 5 kidney disease in 2020.Determined to be a donor, Daniel took action. He began to focus on his diet and exercise.

It took about 13 months to lose the weight needed for organ donation, but Daniel did it

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Maybe love is…

“Maybe, when it comes down to it, love is not about chasing another human being. Maybe, love is about chasing yourself. Chasing your growth. Chasing your hope.
Maybe love is about learning how to be gentle with yourself, how to believe in the way the Universe has removed certain people from your life. And maybe love grows within you when you learn how to trust your own heart, when you learn how to walk away from the things that have not cared for it. Maybe, love is about learning how to accept that sometimes even beautiful things end, that sometimes the timing isn’t right. And maybe love is about learning that endings aren’t something to regret; maybe it is about learning how to let go, how to appreciate the things you experienced at the hands of caring that were real and hopeful and light in a world that sometimes fails to be soft.
Maybe, love is about learning how to be alone. Maybe it is about learning how to wake up in the middle of the bed. How to make just one cup of coffee in the morning. How to hold your own heart, how to take up space. Maybe there is beauty to be found in falling in love with your growth, in learning how to stop filling voids with other human beings, and instead, in slowly having the courage to heal those voids yourself.
Maybe love is about learning how to be proud of the person you are stretching into, is about embracing the beauty and the depth that exists in trying for something while you are here. And maybe within that, love is about honoring your heart. Maybe the truest, and most honest, extension of love exists in the way you learn how to love yourself, exists in the way you learn how to be compassionate towards the parts of yourself, and your journey, that no one else claps for.
Maybe, love exists in the way you fight to be here, in the way you crash your heart into this world. Maybe, love is about you — being your own strength, being your own safe place. Maybe, when it comes down to it, love is about finally learning how to give yourself the same love you so beautifully give to others. Maybe, love is about embracing the person you are becoming, and believing in your heart, on even your hardest of days.”
– @rainbowsalt
via

Life Without Longing

Who would I be if I wasn’t hustling to make some other person, real or imagined, fall in love with me?
 Photographs by Chris Maggio
Text by Melissa Broder
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What is love?

Philosophically, the nature of love has, since the time of the Ancient Greeks, been a mainstay in philosophy, producing theories that range from the materialistic conception of love as purely a physical phenomenon—an animalistic or genetic urge that dictates our behavior—to theories of love as an intensely spiritual affair that in its highest permits us to touch divinity.
Historically, in the Western tradition, Plato’s Symposium presents the initiating text, for it provides us with an enormously influential and attractive notion that love is characterized by a series of elevations, in which animalistic desire or base lust is superseded by a more intellectual conception of love which also is surpassed by what may be construed by a theological vision of love that transcends sensual attraction and mutuality.
Since then there have been detractors and supporters of Platonic love as well as a host of alternative theories—including that of Plato’s student, Aristotle and his more secular theory of true love reflecting what he described as ‘two bodies and one soul.’   continue 

 

80 great quotes about love and romance

"Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That’s all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die. I lift the glass to my mouth, I look at you, and I sigh." (WB Yeats, A Drinking Song)

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