There is a question we all want to ask of those who matter to us: “Am I significant to you?”
Whenever we ask this question of another person, we are really asking a far deeper question. What we really want to know is whether we are significant to ourselves.
In other words, we are actually asking: Does my life have meaning in and of itself? Do I matter even if other people pay little or no attention to me?
When we place our focus on other people in order to feel that our life has meaning, we are sidestepping the real issue. We will always feel insecure and need the reassurance of another person until we ask ourselves the question we prefer to ask of the beloved, seeking their reassurance of what only we can assure ourselves.
“Do you love me?” is the most significant question we can ever ask ourselves.
The real question to which any of us seeks the answer isn’t how to make our life meaningful, or what our purpose is, but whether we in our essence are love.
Love does not need a meaning, or a purpose. It does not even need an object. Does that surprise you?
Love in its essence is a wonderful feeling of ourselves. It is a bubbling up of ecstatic feeling that is its own fulfillment, which then flows freely to all who will receive it.
The decade of the 1970s was called the “me” generation. The question on so many people’s lips was: “Who am I?” To many, this seems a selfish question. It feels narcissistic.
But let’s ask this question a little differently. Instead of asking who we are, let’s ask: “Why am I?”
The answer to this question is clearly that someone or something willed me to be. However you may see the source of your being, you were desired to be.
If you look at what humans want most, it tells you about the nature of the source.
What we all long for is to love and be loved. This is the case because the nature of the source that willed us into being is love.
At the heart of the whole human life-thrust, there is love.
At the heart of the source of human life, what we encounter is also love.
Love is a fullness of being that wells up and pours forth.
What the Little Prince is going to learn on his journey to Earth is that love is an essence within us that is in no way dependent on the existence of the other person.
Love just is.
Can you see the remarkable freedom that enters any kind of relationship when love is just an expression of our being, instead of being tied to getting the other to respond in some way?
The object of the Little Prince’s love, the flower on his planet, repeatedly hurts the little fellow until she finally drives him away.
But the only reason he is hurt is that he is looking for affirmation from her.
Instead, what he needs is to discover his own loving center, which is what his journey is going to teach him.
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