The Consistency of Love

There are moments when truth arrives without warning or ceremony. It doesn’t come from a book or a teaching, but from the most ordinary of settings. In this case it arrived in a coffee shop, at a tall table bathed in sunlight with two cups of coffee perched on the tabletop.

My husband Tony and I were mid-conversation on just such a morning when he uttered a phrase that stopped everything. There was no awareness, I think, on his part of what he had just released into the air between us. The words were simply spoken in the midst of an exchange, and they landed before my mind could catch up with what my body had just received.

…just like the universe imposes its consistency on us…

I told him that what he had just said were some of the most beautiful words I had ever heard. And I meant it, because what arrived in that moment was not a thought to be considered or an argument to be evaluated, but a recognition that bypasses proof entirely. Everything in me understood those words, the whole of me could sense the magnitude of them. The tears that gathered behind my eyes were not sadness. They were the body's honest response to beauty.

As I sat down to write today I knew his words would be the focal point of the blog. It was only upon sitting that my mind grew curious about the word impose as it didn’t feel gentle. The dictionary offers several definitions for the word - to lay on as something to be borne or endured, to put in place by authority, to thrust upon another without invitation. I admit that when I went looking for the definition I was hoping to find it softer than I had remembered; it wasn’t.

And yet the more I turned the definitions over in my mind, the more I began to see something unexpected inside them. What if imposition, when it comes from a source of pure benevolence, is simply another word for love? What if the authority that sets and bounds and thrusts itself upon us is not dominance but care, the care of one who knows more than we do about what we need in order to thrive?

The analogy that came to mind was that of a parent with a young child. Does the parent not also impose? Do they not set boundaries the child did not ask for, enforce rules the child does not yet understand, or insist on conditions the child would not choose for themselves? And is this not done from love, from the authority of one who has already learned, perhaps the hard way, what happens when certain limits are ignored? The universe, I am finding, operates with something of the same loving insistence. The universe, though, unlike the most devoted parent, carries no ulterior motive, exhaustion, or fear. Only a pure, consistent impulse toward our flourishing.

What I understood in that coffee shop moment, and still learning in the daily texture of ordinary life, is that the universe is love through and through, from beginning to end. In my last reflection I wrote about the real that lies beneath the imitation, how the work of transformation is less about becoming something new than about uncovering what was always already present. What Tony's words gave me were an expanded outward recognition of the real on a scale I had not quite considered before.

The inner work and the universe's work are not separate endeavors, but the same consistent love, operating at different scales pressing toward what is most real, most free, and most genuine. The difficulty lies in the hard moments when it is difficult to accept that the pressing has arrived. The universe does not impose its love only in coffee shops warmed by morning light. It imposes love equally in the friction, the misunderstanding, the conversation that asks more of us than we feel ready to give.

Not long after the coffee shop morning, Tony and I found ourselves working through one of those pressing conversations. You know the kind, where the ordinary friction of two people living closely together surfaces patterns and needs finally asking to be seen? The conversation was not comfortable, and yet, I could feel, even inside the discomfort, the universe's consistency at work.

Conflict, when we are willing to stay present to it, has a way of pressing on the exact places that are needing freedom. We could even say it presses on the unreal parts of us. The discomfort reveals the patterning, the inner critic, the mental loops that have been quietly covering over what is real. The unreal, in me, the relationship, the space between two people who love each other while still learning how, is the consistent imposition.

Such discomfort is what I mean when I say the universe's goodness is nestled inside the difficult. I am not saying that difficulty is pleasant or that we should pretend otherwise, but that consist love is operating there too, pressing us gently and sometimes not so gently toward the conditions under which we can genuinely flourish. The same love that warms the coffee shop morning is present in the evening's harder conversation. The universe can not change its nature depending on how the moment feels to us.

I have been learning, slowly and not without resistance, to trust the ordinary as a carrier of truth. This is not as simple as it sounds. Most of us have been conditioned to look for truth in elevated places, in institutions and credentials and in moments that feel sufficiently significant to deserve our full attention. We have learned to distrust even ourselves, which causes us to second-guess phrases that fall from ordinary lips on an ordinary morning in a coffee shop.

But any good teacher will tell you that truth is truth no matter where it comes from. It does not require requirements, but arrives when it arrives, through whatever ordinary vessel happens to be available. This arrival of truth could be in a book, song, moment of stillness, or even a husband across from you at a table.

What the universe seems to ask of us, in its quiet and consistent way, is simply that we become available enough to receive what it is already offering. We do not need to manufacture the right conditions or arrive at the right understanding, but just remain open, to a phrase, to a conflict, to the ordinary that turns out to be carrying something we will not forget.

I’m learning to stake my life on what arrives through the unremarkable, and I am finding that such trust is not a small thing.

Where in your ordinary life might the universe be imposing its consistency on you? What pressing have you not yet allowed yourself to fully receive?