‘THE WAY TO HAPPINESS’ EXCLUSIVE COLUMN BY JACQUELINE WAY
THE COMMON THREAD WHAT RUNS THROUGH EVERY HUMAN BEING
I will always remember the day I held my son in my arms for the first time. Unlike most women I was not in a delivery room at a hospital or at home. I had not spent nine months nurturing and caring for my unborn child while it grew in my body. Instead, I learned I had become a mother from a phone call. Just days later my husband and I took a short drive to meet our first child. An 11-week-old baby boy that had been chosen for us not by us. We signed the adoption papers sight unseen promising to make him part of our family forever. A dream that had lived in my heart fueled by the common thread that runs through every human being on our planet – love. We pulled up to a small townhouse that was our son’s temporary foster home. I thought my heart was going to leap out of my chest. I knew I was walking toward my destiny. The door slowly opened, and I saw my son swaddled in a blanket in the arms of his foster mother. I stood in the front door and she handed me this beautiful little person and she simply said, “Meet your son.” I took him in my arms and in that moment the entire world stopped. It was just the two of us connected beyond any time or space reality. There was no fear in his eyes being put into the arms of a stranger. Instead, I received the greatest gift of my life - a smile. I held him close as tears of joy streamed down my face and I whispered in his ear “I’ve been waiting for you. I will love you forever.” It was the first moment in my life I had felt unconditional love. We knew very little about our son. His cultural heritage, the religion his birth parents practiced or didn’t practice, his IQ based on genetic history, how tall he would be or even the colour of his hair. None of it mattered. We didn’t even know if he had all his fingers and toes and it did not matter. Nothing could stop the flow of love radiating from every cell of our bodies. It changed my “perceptual” idea of love. I understood in that moment I had the ability to love another living creature without any preconceived expectations or boundaries set by society. I was free to love. Since the beginning of time love has been woven through the fabric of the human experience. The mythical Greek Gods of love still shoot arrows through our Hallmark cards. All religions preach and teach about love with their own version of a “superior” being that loves all the children of our earth. All cultures have love songs that raise the hair on the back of our neck. We watch romantic movies that make us feel warm and fuzzy from the inside out. We read books that take us into the hearts of fictional characters experiencing a journey of love so many wish to take. We search for it, we try to buy it, we even try to pharmaceutically recreate it in our bodies. But what we have learned about love is it comes from within us not from outside in. This isn’t just spiritual or religious guru talk. Science can now show us that love is literally in our DNA. The biological make up of human beings has a hormone that has been deemed our “love hormone” called Oxytocin. It starts a remarkable chemical reaction that fires and wires through our bodies and brains. It’s like an internal set of fireworks that all work together creating that feeling we call love. Imagine it’s like a switch that turns a light on or off. When you flip a light switch, energy runs through the wires to the lightbulb. The lightbulb turns on giving light to a dark room. You can’t actually see the energy running through the wires to the light bulb. But you know the bulb will turn on and give light if the energy is flowing, and the switch is working. 71 AWARENOW / THE HUMAN EDITION
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