Without Certainty

This week I’ve been reflecting on love.

I’ve been reading Evolution in Divine Love by Swami Padmanabha, and there’s a definition that has been following me around for days now:

“A profoundly intentional disposition, free from ulterior motives, aimed at promoting the best for the one we love.”

At first, it sounds beautiful and obvious. Of course love wants what is best for another person.

But the more I sat with it, the more I found myself stuck on a single word:

Best.

Because what does that actually mean?

Best according to whom?

The question sounds philosophical until you really begin applying it to real life. Then suddenly it becomes deeply uncomfortable.

We often assume love means helping someone move toward happiness, stability, success, healing, clarity. But all of those ideas are shaped by our own experience, values, fears, and desires. One person’s healing is another person’s collapse. One person’s freedom is another person’s instability. One person’s truth is another person’s disaster.

A parent may believe the “best” thing is protection.

A partner may believe it is closeness.

A teacher may believe it is discipline.

A healer may believe it is transformation.

And most of the time, none of these people are acting maliciously. They genuinely care. They genuinely want to help.

But I’m beginning to wonder how often our idea of what is “best” is quietly shaped by our own need for certainty.

We want people safe because their suffering scares us.

We want people stable because unpredictability destabilizes us too.

We want people healed because helplessness is difficult to tolerate.

We want people to stay understandable.

Manageable.

Recognizable.

And sometimes what we call love is tangled together with all of that.

That realization stopped feeling abstract this week while I was writing this.

Someone close to me called because his wife was in the middle of a severe mental health episode. He was trying to figure out what to do, and the truth was that there wasn’t a clear answer available to him.

He didn’t want to bring her to a hospital because they had already gone through that once before. She had been hospitalized, held for a few days, and then released right back into the same situation. In his mind, the cycle led nowhere.

But he also couldn’t force her to do anything. She’s an adult. She has her own autonomy, her own decisions, her own reality she’s living inside of.

So he called me asking what he should do.

And strangely enough, I found myself reading him the definition of love I had been sitting with all week.

“Aimed at promoting the best for the one we love.”

And we both just kind of stopped at the word best.

Then laughed.

Not because it was funny.

But because suddenly the impossibility of the question became obvious.

What is best for the person you love in a moment like that?

How do you know?

And maybe even more honestly:

Who are you to decide?

That’s the part of love I don’t think we talk about enough.

We often speak about love as though caring deeply about someone should somehow grant us wisdom. As though love itself should tell us exactly what to do.

But it doesn’t.

Sometimes love leaves you sitting in uncertainty, trying to respond to a situation that has no clean answer.

Sometimes love means realizing you cannot control another person’s path, no matter how deeply you care about them.

And maybe part of maturity is recognizing that caring for someone does not automatically mean understanding what their life should become.

Erich Fromm wrote that love requires care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. But I don’t think he meant knowledge in the sense of mastering another person or fully understanding them. I think he meant the willingness to continually encounter another person as they actually are.

That feels important to me.

Because the moment we believe we fully know another person, we often stop listening.

We stop meeting them in the present.

We begin relating more to our idea of them than to the living person standing in front of us.

And maybe that’s where suffering begins.

Buddhism speaks often about attachment, though I think many people misunderstand what that means. Non-attachment does not mean indifference. It does not mean becoming cold, detached, or emotionally distant. It means learning how to love without trying to possess. Without demanding permanence from things that are fundamentally alive and changing.

We suffer partly because we keep asking living things to hold still.

But people do not hold still.

Relationships do not hold still.

Love itself does not hold still.

Swami Padmanabha says that the moment love stops moving, it stops being love.

I haven’t stopped thinking about that either.

Because maybe love cannot become rigid.

Maybe love has to remain alive enough to respond to reality rather than forcing reality into an idea we already decided upon.

We often think consistency is proof of love. But maybe responsiveness is.

Maybe love requires enough openness to keep meeting another person again and again as they continue changing.

Because people change.

Relationships change.

Needs change.

Understanding changes.

Sometimes the person standing in front of us no longer fits the image we built of them years ago. And suffering often begins the moment we start relating more to our memory of someone than to who they are becoming now.

Maybe love dies the moment we decide we fully understand another person, or fully understand what their life should look like.

Not because structure, commitment, or devotion are unimportant. But because living things move. Living things evolve. Living things surprise us.

Love that cannot adapt eventually becomes something else.

Control.

Possession.

Projection.

Fear disguised as care.

And this becomes especially complicated when another person is suffering.

Because helplessness is one of the hardest human experiences to tolerate.

To watch someone you love struggle while not knowing how to help them is excruciating. The mind immediately begins searching for certainty, for systems, for answers, for solutions that will make the anxiety stop.

But maybe love sometimes asks something more difficult than certainty.

Maybe it asks for humility.

The humility to admit that another person’s life is ultimately not ours to control.

The humility to remain present without forcing resolution too quickly.

The humility to keep listening when clarity has not yet arrived.

My friend and I never really arrived at an answer that night.

In the end, he decided to continue letting the situation unfold until direction became more apparent.

And strangely enough, that did not feel passive.

It felt responsive.

Attentive.

Alive.

Which makes me wonder if that may be part of love too.

Not always knowing.

Not always fixing.

Not always deciding immediately.

But remaining present enough to move honestly with life as it continues unfolding in front of us.