Love on Cloud Seven

Life is like the internet. It doesn't start or end anywhere. You are part of it but you are neither it nor do you own it in any way, but by your very ability to be part of it, you are owned by it.

Your connection and disconnection may look like the birth and death of your life to you, but these alter it in no significant way. That's because life is not something that was birthed into you; you were birthed into life. Birth and death are not complementary to, or opposites of life: they are a strategy of life as much as unreliable connections a strategy of the internet.

Life is self seeking beyond reason. It is an unemotional, fierce, and self-centered force that neither forgives nor forgets but keeps record of all wrongs in its evolving DNA with the sole objective of preserving itself. Life is not about you. To life, you are just another statistic, like how a cell in your body or a bacteria in your guts - nothing more than a sophisticated "naturally" intelligent risk-aware machinery that preserves it.

Love, and love, is everything that you throw at life to make your experience of being conscious a narrative about you.

It is everything that life isn't. It is destructive but gentle, emotional but forgiving, it is personal but able to reach outside the skin, able to acknowledge and embrace other living things that are not physically part of us, and treat them as an integral part of us and call them community, body, enemy, or family.

Love is the cloud on the 7th layer of the internet, the application of life through which we gain faces and create meaning in the hardware that is us. Love is the stories we tell ourselves to makes sense of the world around us. Love is incapable of truth nor falsehood, because love is the stories in which we carve out our reality. It is the ground we stand on and the stars above.

Above all, we need love because it is the one force we have against life's harshness. It is the only thing that keeps is together, and the only real defense in the face of our completely irrational choice of staying alive.