WHAT ARE YOU LOVING RIGHT NOW?

In the quiet aftermath of the tragedy in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, a place about 25km from where I sit in this very moment, a place where forty young lives were lost on New Year’s Eve. A heavy stillness has settled over Switzerland. It is the kind of silence that slows time, stripping away the trivial and leaving only the profound. There is nothing to say; the grief is too deep, too wide, too intense for words.

In such moments, instinct takes the lead. We pull our children closer; we reach for the hands of those beside us. The sadness, in its painful clarity, reminds us what matters.

It was within this space of reflection that, on January 2nd, I read an editorial by David Brooks in The New York Times. He posed a single, deceptively simple question that has stayed with me ever since:

“What are you loving right now?” 

I have been sitting with this question for days, not for its answers, but for its necessity. It is perhaps the most innately human question we can ask not only others but ourselves, yet we far too often reserve it for times of grief. We should live with it continually, not just when loss forces clarity upon us, but at all times, recognising its power as a compass.

Today’s world is accelerated, performative, and fractured. We are constantly pulled toward curated identities and hardened positions. We are encouraged to speak, to declare, and to defend, but rarely are we invited to listen, to stay, or, significantly, to be changed. We have become visible, yet not always present; connected yet deeply detached.

Brooks’ question lands with such weight because it is grounded. It doesn’t ask what we do, what we achieve, or how we present ourselves to the world. It asks what has reached us. It asks what’s needed to break through our armour of distraction and self-protection. It asks us how we direct our thoughts, our energies, our hearts.

When we love something, a person, a craft, a place, something within us responds to something outside ourselves. It is an ignition. We begin to pay attention. We notice the details. We linger beyond the tangible, beyond the ‘me’, beyond the now, beyond the label. 

To love a person is to show up faithfully in the small, unnoticed moments. It is the willingness to listen when something feels off and stay present through change, contradiction, and imperfection.

To love a place is to honour the light of the morning and the fragility of what sustains it. It is tending a garden or protecting a river until you feel responsible for it. It reminds us that we are participants in this world, not its owners.

To love a craft is to find dignity in repetition, patience, and humility. It is the beauty of doing something well, slowly, long before any audience is watching.

To love art is to allow a painting to slow our pulse, or music to open something we didn’t know was closed. It is a poem that gives language to what we felt, but couldn’t articulate.

This is the power of love and care when it is rooted in our shared humanity. It is not loud, not absolutist, and not ideological. It is a love that listens before it speaks, tending to what is fragile and creating rather than consuming. It gathers the scattered, frantic threads of modern life and weaves them back into a cohesive fabric of living. It adds texture, taste, and depth, allowing us to truly enjoy the present.

Without intentional love, life indeed continues; it can be efficient, managed, and productive, but it remains disconnected. When we invite love in, life ‘thickens’. Our days no longer endure or are managed through a checklist; they are lived through meaning.

It is vital to recognise that this is not about working harder or striving for more. This is not about having an agenda. It is about having lucidity. I am reminded of my father’s words on his deathbed, a truth that has never left me. He looked at me and said that no one in his position wishes they had worked harder. In those final hours, the illusions of “success” strip away. What people miss are not the meetings or the deals. They miss the moments of connection. They regret the times they were too busy to notice, the places they passed through without really being there, and the people they loved but did not always show it to.

Ultimately, a meaningful life is not built by extracting more from ourselves, but by engaging more fully with who and what is already before us. What matters is not acceleration, but attention, not pressure, but presence.

So, I return to the question as an invitation. Not as a provocation or a test, but as an honest pause:

What are you loving right now? 

Do not answer quickly or with performative confidence. Answer truthfully. And when you hear and feel your answer, hold onto it, hold it tight.

Because in the asking, and in the listening for an answer, we rediscover not only what we love, but the essence of how we live. If the answer that comes to you feels faint, uncertain, or even absent, do not view it as a failure. Quite the contrary, it is an opening, an honest signal that something essential within you is waiting to be reawakened. 

These days, marked not only by sorrow and loss but also by a broader sense of uncertainty that seems to hang over our world, I feel something is needed. Beneath the grief, beneath the noise and the hardening edges of our time, there is a subtle pull back toward what endures. Toward care. Toward attention. Toward one another.

This may be how renewal begins, not as an answer to what is broken, but as a refusal to let it hollow us out. In me, in hope for our world, it begins with a willingness to love. Deeply. Gently. Without performance. And with the courage to stay human in an unsettled time.