"This moment passes. That person walks away. Happiness is still possible."

For me, this is just one of the more challenging thoughts in a book that is largely encouraging, insightful, and loving in its own right. It's a short book, and the sections or chapters are mostly less than a page, each offering an idea or anecdote to convey a set of principles and aspirations about love - or at least try to suggest what 'true love' is.

And that's really my one significant point of disagreement or discomfort - the suggestion that there is such a state as 'true love'. This is a notion that oversimplifies the complexity and diversity of loving relations, and holds one such way of relating up as an idealised embodiment of a concept that has any number of definitions, experiences and ideas attached to it. Pursuing one ideal of love is reasonable I suppose as part of an aspirational spiritual or psychological agenda, as is 'over'-simplifying a vastly rich territory of human experience in order to encourage us in that agenda. And while I subscribe to much of this particular spiritual and psychological agenda, I do still struggle and squirm with the normative implications of 'true' and with the loss of the messy human richness and history of the word 'love'.

It's a lovely book overall, and while at moments it verged slightly on the saccharine, it also has some provocative 'bite' in places, and some helpful practical ideas on improving loving relationships. ( )

Picked this up on the cheap because I feel like Zen people don’t get into metta enough and I figured this would be the guy to look toward.

It’s unfortunately close to a collection of Instagram quotes that make a lot of assertions that feel unsupported. Too treacly. ( )

Distilled wisdom of preeminent Zen master in short notes about what constitutes true love, and conversely, what it isn’t. As always, Thich Nhat Hanh expresses profound truths in the simplest of ways. It is most effective when he includes metaphors and analogies to illustrate his points, such as the opening note Heart Like a River.
"If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform. So the big question is: how do we help our hearts to grow?"
The second part includes some practical advice/exercises for nourishing true love.
The format of short notes, each a few sentences, makes the book convenient not just to read as a whole, but to occasionally just open randomly and remind ourselves of its inspirational wisdom. ( )

There is a lot of pithy wisdom in this little book. We all need to love better than we often do, and this may inspire you to do so a little better. ( )