Three Children Were Asked What Love Is: Adults Can Learn from Their Answers.

One of my students was recently impressed by the answers of three young children who were asked “What is love to you?” and asked me about whether we could learn from these kids’ answers in our expressions of love as adults.

What did these kids say?

• One of the kids answered, “Love is when you give someone most of your candies without forcing them to give you anything back.” In other words, giving what we like for the benefit of others is an expression of love.
• The second child answered, “Love is what makes you smile at the other kids when you’re tired.” That is also an expression of love, the intent to raise others’ spirits despite our own feelings of resistance.
• The third child answered, “Love is when you wear a shirt all day long that a friend told you was beautiful and that they liked to see.” That is another expression of love, i.e., wishing to please others by doing something for them that you know they like.

Indeed, as adults, we would be wise to learn from these simple expressions of love and implement them in society. However, we have grown up to become people who often demonstrate opposite traits of hatred, belligerence, divisiveness, and indifference, which breed much hardship and suffering in our lives.

The reason for this is the continual growth of our ego—the desire to enjoy for self-benefit at the expense of others—that wishes to devour everything for itself. However, the aforementioned expressions of love do not leave us entirely. They remain as inner potential and an opportunity for us to start developing selflessly, to tread on the overblown ego and realize these simple expressions of love similarly to the children’s explanations, the difference being that as adults, we do so out of awareness and overcoming.

Against the backdrop of myriad struggles and conflicts we find ourselves in today, many of which inflame hatred between us, let us hope that we hurry to find in us the simple innocence of exercising expressions of love to each other and that we seek to create new connections fueled by supporting, encouraging and caring for love to lift us all up above our divisions, i.e., to achieve what is written, that “love will cover all crimes.”