Do we notice these subtle opportunities for love which are woven through our daily lives? I think more often we miss them, as I nearly did. It shouldn’t take a story of loss to make me appreciate a Tuesday morning phone call with my mum, but I’ve found there are few epiphanies in life that lead to an automatic change of habit. Even when we learn a lesson, it’s likely we forget it and have to learn it again. Even when we recognize a mistake, we make the same one a few more times before fully ditching the pattern. This is certainly the way I learnt – and am still learning – that a meaningful life is built on many different forms of love. Not from a seismic turning point, but through a collection of small reminders that nudge me closer to the truth, like a lost boat at sea suddenly steered in the right direction by the wind.

I used to think love was the feeling hanging between me and my mum on that phone call, a mix of what I felt for her and what she felt for me. But now I understand that love was the act of switching the way I responded to the moment; it existed in both the intention and the choice to consciously focus on it. When you understand love in this way – as an action, not a feeling – it’s easier to see why it’s unhelpful to view the absence of one form as a complete lack of it. The best description I’ve found of this error is from psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm, who compares the attitude ‘to that of the man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he has to just wait for the right object, and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it’. Love, by his definition, is ‘a power which produces love’. It is not the object you’re painting, but the process of learning to paint. It’s not admiring flowers from afar, it’s the act of nurturing them so they don’t die. It’s an ‘attitude’, a ‘power of the soul’ or an ‘orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole’.