Love and compassion are cliches overwhelmed by marketers, soppy filmmakers, greedy corporations, and trashy books. Love has become a sappy word, tossed around like confetti.

I hear about love so often it no longer has much of a meaning, yet it is perhaps an essential thing in my life, something I have been searching for all my life but found only recently.

My problem was that I felt too big, too high, about love and made it into too much of a drama. It’s a simple thing, I found out, not found with giant and romantic steps, but with small steps every time an opportunity arises.

For me, love came when I brought cheese and chocolates to Maria in her studio when she was hungry, not from teary declarations or lavish gifts. And when she called me every day to tell me my photographs were good when I didn’t think they were.

It comes when I smile at strangers walking past me or say good morning to people at the post office.

It comes with a word of encouragement, a gesture of support, a phone call to a sick friend, a kind gesture, a moment of attention, an offer of help, a present of flowers, a visit to a lonely person, a donation to a good cause, shoes to someone at the Mansion, books to a refugee child.

I always write generous things about people who help me on the telephone or treat me courteously. I thank people when they try to help me. To me, this softens the world a bit.

Love Is essential; I’ve learned to acknowledge the humanity of people in a world drowning in technology, sometimes choking in it. Religious people talk about love all the time, but they often fail to live it.

The small steps of love softened me and opened me up to the bigger ones.

I see each step as a candle glowing in the dark or an angel sailing through the sky.

Love can make the darkness go away, but it lights the way through it to the light.

The small steps add up. They soften me, open my eyes, and fill my life with meaning. We live in a difficult time, and I think love can be its own pandemic in the face of so much anger, grievance, and hatred.

It has a way of spreading.