In a world driven by love Part I

If you have ever been in a relationship of some kind - so that's all of us - then you know that love is complicated. I mean love is simple and profound and it is complex and riles up all other emotions stretching parts of our being we never knew could be stretched so far. And still we participate, again and again, in this experience of love. I often wonder if we do, because we are energy beings made from and of love. I know this can sound sappy...but after a quarter of a century of my life parenting I know what love can do. Love has driven me to be more, to stretch myself out in ways I didn't think possible, to re-think belief systems I held deep within, to hold to hope and faith in ways that are beyond my limited capacity for understanding. Love has asked me to re-imagine life again and again and it has not done this quietly. And love shows up differently. For me, love shows up in the conversations I hold with my children, the time we take to dive into deep topics of import and when we hash out problems together trying to find a common understanding. For my husband, love shows up in his steadfast hand at work, his disciplined way of ensuring he has done his part to provide for our home, and in the careful choices he makes when he calls a day off to volunteer for our kids school activities knowing he will lose a day of pay. Even our budget is made of love. We make careful decisions about how we will spend our money, choosing to use it on those things that reflect our values and beliefs. These are all driven by love. 

So how does this understanding of love show up in the world? 

At the ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) Conference the opening keynote speaker, Michio Kaku, spoke about the fourth wave of wealth creation in our society: technological advances.

I listened to all the exciting advances being made from the internet on contact lenses, digital wall paper and flexible screens you can unravel from your phone to human ears being digitalized and grown from human cells. One has to wonder, what drives all of this innovation...what pushes us forward to learn more, to know more and to desire more. 
There is a natural curiosity that is innate in children and we seek to find out the why of life. As we become older, life becomes more complex, and unraveling the why can be harder to do. In Western society we like answers that are concrete and seem finite. The more challenging the questions in life, the harder it can be to find the finite answers. But we persevere, like in our relationships, we persevere, when we discover something new we change our belief systems. Why? I argue, science is also driven by love. There is a desire to know and to seek to understand, to solve complex problems of the life of matter. Maybe these waves that Michio Kaku talks about are really waves of love that are just showing up differently in our world. What is wealth anyway, if not abundance? And abundance is a quality of the spirit, in the world of matter it shows up as wealth. When I think of the fourth wave that Dr. Kaku talks about in these terms, then we are entering a time when love is exponential! If love is a force, an energy - which I believe it is - then what an explosion of love we are seeing in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and quantum physics. And love will do what it does - it will stretch us and demand more from us! Is it any wonder that we are being challenged to question those things which we have always held dear: What does communication look like today? What does it mean to be connected? How do I understand all the information that is coming at me? 
So this fourth wave of love will demand more of us - as Dr. Kaku says, it will ask us to be more creative and more innovative in our thinking. After all, robots are just adding machines and because of their speed they create an illusion of intelligence.  Robots, do not have that animating force within each of us that binds and connects to each other...asking, by simply existing, that we be more.