I listened to this amazing podcast this week and wept at some of the stories Jack Kornfield told.

One was about the poet, naturalist, and activist Gary Snyder who has been working on environmental justice for decades. When asked what advice he had for this generation, he said, “It won’t work to try to save the world out of guilt. We have to do it for love.”

Another story was about Christiana Figueres, convener and chairperson of the Paris Climate Accords. She was getting embittered, exhausted, frustrated, and hopeless as she tried to convince everyone of the work’s importance. Someone suggested she visit Plum Village, the Buddhist community in France, to get a different perspective. She did, and her contemplative time there gave her this insight: Oh! I see now that we are all one family. And her work began to flow out of that space instead of scarcity, anger, and division.

We live and work from so many places other than love! We do it for acclaim or to burnish our image. We do it for security or to feel less ashamed. We work from perfection or a spirit of reforming. We want to feel special, known, smart, in charge, entertained, safe, powerful. All those are legitimate human needs, and they aren’t bad. But they are insufficient for the long haul. They don’t hold up, and we mistake those motivations for who we are.

Getting down to love requires letting ourselves be loved and seeing ourselves through eyes of love. This is the work of a lifetime—we try to wriggle out of this, and that’s where so much of our pain comes from. As I head into my 50th year, I’m still awkwardly learning, but I feel myself getting closer to the ground of love. Many, many days and moments, I can make my way back there when I’ve strayed. I think that’s why they call it “practice.”

Earlier this week, my colleague Laura and I were with 90 preschool teachers. Instead of using a chime or verbal entreaties to call them back from breaks or out of small groups, we sang the refrain from the Beatles: Love, love, love. Love, love, love. Throughout the day, it morphed into things like “joy, joy, joy” or “fun, fun, fun,” or at noon, “lunch, lunch, lunch.” They gamely joined us, blending their voices together in a big, stale conference room, and I thought, “This is it. This is everything. The world is coming apart at the seams, and we are singing it back together. Thank you, Love.”