I adapt my perspective on love from bell hooks, who offered this definition by M. Scott Peck: “Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”[^1]
It is true that we can’t exactly know what the future holds, but we must “greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that *we do not know enough to be pessimistic*.”[^2]
[^2]: Hazel Henderson, *The Politics of the Solar Age: Alternatives to Economics* (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Double Day, 1981), 411. Quoted from Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, *Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care* (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2023).