Why?

Love, Life, Practice. Three words that are as loaded and layered with meaning as just about any in the English language. What exactly do I mean when I talk about them?

Yes.

Seriously, that’s my answer. I have heard people qualify these words when talking about them. “Oh, when I say love, I don’t mean the sticky, gooey kind of love, I mean platonic.” “Life as in biology, not as in quality of your environment.” Even practice has multiple meanings: “I opened a coaching practice so that I could practice helping people do their zen practice.”

I’m not qualifying. When I talk about love, I’m talking about everything from “I love Amsterdam!” to “I love the way you kiss me” to “I love our puppy dog so much!”

I’m talking Life with a big L, from diet and exercise to your dreams and the places you ended up finding along the way.

And practice? That’s what brings it all together. It’s pragmatic methods, rituals, outlooks and habits that will make the love and the life better. Not because you’ll attain some enlightened, peaceful state, but because practice, as Chris Brogan put it, is an end unto itself.

The goal of  Love, Life, Practice is not to make life easier or simpler. We do not live in a simple or easy world. Times are, by almost any measure, hard on you, your family, your friends, your culture. While there is certainly some value in simplicity, I don’t believe that it is the default answer for everything. There is beauty in complexity, too, when many parts work together smoothly.

“Complicated”, on the other hand, is when many parts don’t work smoothly. I’ve had a lot of complications in my life, and that’s why this project was created. I believe that by sharing the experiences, we can find better ways of loving. Of living. Of practicing. In all the myriad ways you can imagine.

There’s no easy, mystical, one-size-fits-all solution. Life is a gritty, real struggle for survival, and that’s ok – we have the tools and capability to dance through it, rather than scramble. That’s the goal of Love, Life, Practice. To make it better, moment by moment, inch by inch, until the practice is its own goal.