DEFINITION | Douglas Thompson Love is the feeling not just of empathy for someone else, but the desire to help them and comfort and support them. It is also a fascinationto learn more, to be near that person to be able to enjoy at every available moment all the miraculousness of their physical presence, mental prowess and emotional generosity and unpredictability. Like two mirrors, a reflection occurs which tends to infinity: we admire their admiration for us. We are moved by how they are moved by us. We are comforted to see that we can comfort them. These "feedback loops" give us the momentary impression, which is not necessarily an illusion, that we can exceed the limits of ourselves, the limits even of us and our partner, the limits even of being human. If we believe that all sentient creatures are fragments of the force that created us: a God who is being built in the future through all life finding itself and becoming aware across time, then love is the tangible miracle of that interaction between two such fragments. We discover to our delight and our amazement, that we fit, that we are not just arbitrary individuals but living jigsaw pieces, whose unity when achieved: points the way to a higher reality occupied by the life force itself. That glimpse is exalting because it imparts to us the knowledge of what lies at the heart of that life force: infinite compassion and tenderness, patience, forgiveness and unstoppable power.