Love can be fireworks and sparks. Holding hands tight at a New Year’s Party - the feeling of never letting go - the exhilarating thrill of shouting your love over too loud music and spinning around and around and around oblivious.

Love can be kindness and care. Stifling your laughter as they fall off the toilet drunk, and carefully holding their hair as the food poison sick flows out. Sitting by their bed as they sleep and you watch over.

Love can be bursting with pride and joy as they make all your friends laugh and you seem smart and lovely for being the other half.

Love can be owning the world and daring all things as the all of you together are so much more powerful than apart. Walking the streets of Tokyo at night, not needing to know where you are and excited that you’ve never been.

Love can be adventures and quests as you seek out rare yarn in undiscovered suburb towns in countries you’ve never been to. Trying untested foods together conquering unknowns.

Love can be still and soft. Coffees on the sofa, head down in books, eating croissants, discussing what to have for lunch and at lunch what to have for dinner and where does the best poached eggs. Noting down a pattern they would like, a scene that only they would think funny.

Love can be a panic and a recovery and listening to logic as they hyperventilate on the side of the mountain and praying to the laws of physics knowing the staircase is not falling down.

Love can be all the little things. Tiny messages. Glimpsed touches. Small kindnesses.

Love can be the public declarations at a wedding but equally sharing a seat on a bus stuck in traffic.

Love can be made daily, love can last like stone.

Love can slip through cupped hands like the tiniest of fish, love can pick you up if you fall

Love makes us rich, who being loved is poor?

Lest we forget, let us remember.

 ...When I was seven years old, I thought 40 was ancient.

I felt the same turning sixteen. 40 was still ancient.

This was one of the themes in my play Yellow Gentlemen.*

What would 16 year old me think of 40 year old me?

There was a school project, when I was eight, that asked us to think about the future. I opted for a moderate view of the future. To much bemusement I didn’t want anything too grand - perhaps already suspecting that the vast wealth of a few of my peers wasn’t securing them happiness or love.

Evoking - perhaps oddly - Oprah Winfrey (on gratitude*) and Sheryl Sandberg (on grief and gratitude*) - I think I have an enormous amount to be grateful for.  I’m comfortable with wealth, I’m loved and love, and Eudaimonia happy - with hard challenges such as autism, to be sure - and large responsibilities that come with wealth and education.

This week, I come round to reflect on love (see above). Like in so many things in Western thinking, the old Greek thinkers have been here already.

There are several types of love distinguished in Greek (*see below) And while I’m still astonished by those in the agape spiritual love of Christ or Buddhism, Allah, God, gods, Shinto and the like  - I have a thought more on some of the others.

 

 

Agape – the love of humanity

This is an unconditional love that sees beyond the outer surface and accepts the recipient for whom he/she is, regardless of their flaws, shortcomings or faults.

Storge – family love

It is a kind of family and friendship love. This is the love that parents naturally feel for their children

Pragma – love which endures

The love between a married couple which develops over a long period of time. The love which endures in sickness and in health. The love which makes a friend care for their former school friend who has become vulnerable in later life.

Philautia – self-respect

The love we give to ourselves

Philia – shared experience

The love we feel for people we strive with to achieve a shared goal – our co-workers, the players in a football or netball team,

Ludus – flirting, playful affection

The feelings we have when we test out what it might be like to be in love with someone.

Eros – romantic  love

Eros is a passionate and intense love that arouses romantic feelings;

Phileo – chosen love

The phileo love refers to an affectionate, warm and tender platonic love.

Sandberg on grief and gratitude

My Play Yellow Gentlemen

Oprah on Gratitude

The current Arts blog, cross-over, the current Investing blog.  Cross fertilise, some thoughts on autism.  Discover what the arts/business mingle… (sign up for invites to the next event in the list below).

My Op-Ed in the Financial Times  (My Financial Times opinion article) about asking long-term questions surrounding sustainability and ESG.

Current highlights:

A thought on how to die well and Mortality

Some writing tips and thoughts from Zadie Smith

How to live a life, well lived. Thoughts from a dying man. On play and playing games.

A provoking read on how to raise a feminist child.

Some popular posts:  the commencement address;  by NassimTaleb (Black Swan author, risk management philosopher),  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes;  JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  Charlie Munger on always inverting;  Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude.

Buy my play, Yellow Gentlemen, (amazon link) - all profits to charity