A brilliant mind once said, “It’s all about the love.”

That brilliant mind was an eight year old version of myself with whom I believe I have very little in common. She liked pink more than purple and was afraid of the dark, thunderstorms, and Harry Potter. She wanted to be a dog groomer.

Quite notably, a lot has changed.

But it’s reassuring to think that, even then, I had a notion of what made life worthwhile. The phrase, while trite, means more to me now than I think it ever did at age eight when I repeated it incessantly to the amusement of my parents.

If the “it” in my phrase refers to our existence, I think I was really onto something.

At the tail end of the first crucial segment of my life, I’m beginning to understand what truly matters and, accordingly, I’m determining how I’ll to conduct the next segment I’m soon to embark on.

In a number of months I will be starting fresh in Ireland. The things that seemed so hugely important to me here will fade to memory, emblems of a separate life. I know I will gain new priorities, new interests, new pursuits. The grade I received on a math test junior year, crushing as it may have been at the time, will be dust in the wind. It already is.

But there’s one abiding artifact of who I was before and who I will be in the future. One vital piece that is so often mistaken for a singular denotation when in reality it is all-encompassing, omnipresent, and vastly bigger than us alone.

Love.

I knew it then. I’m just beginning to know it again now.

I don’t just mean the kind of love between mother and child, brother and sister. I’m talking about the love that you don’t always see but you know is there; the love you feel when you stare out the window of a train and wish you could see every detail faster than it disappears; when you finally eat precisely what you were craving with the people whose presence you craved as well; when your best friend laughs and you realize how familiar it sounds, like rain, like the ocean; when you walk around a city after dark, the night a world of secrets you only can discover by being awake to explore them; when you open the blinds to welcome the sunlight of a new day; when you get a window seat on an airplane and you watch one city shrink beneath clouds and another materialize soon after; when warm sleepiness overcomes you and there’s a familiar shoulder to rest your head on beside you.

Love is not singular. Love is vast and complete and unconditional if it is true. It triumphs over trivial things, takes precedence over them always. It is everywhere if you are willing to squint your eyes, look closely, and see it.

And, as I once knew so well, it’s what life is all about.