The opening line in M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled offers: “Life is difficult.” The book was a bestseller and one that I’m sure helped many. That line has stuck with me but over the years something about the wording bothered me. When it finally occurred to me—the stickiness and the curiosity of those three words—the thought became another “thing” that stuck and tickled my wondering.

Life and love. Nouns but not really. As far as I can tell they are the same. And both verbs.

The highest expression of living is loving.

And loving is living.

And it’s difficult to understand a life—yours or another’s.

Other sources say, to live is to suffer. While you lose most everything, what you don’t lose are not things. It matters.

In between the snippets, selfies, and “Hey Siri” is a void that echoes important messages from the past and the future. For fathers and mothers. At the end of another revolution around the sun, the echoes whisper to me, “Your boys are men, young and full of potential.” But that word, potential, is far more precious once you realize the source…

And the source is nothing that can be defined by a noun.

photo credit: Johannes Plenio