The Habit of Loving

07 February 2026

https://poems.culturing.net/2026/02/the-habit-of-loving/

How does one acquire the habit of loving?
Not by loving, of course, for how could they love
without the habit? Yet there is a kind of practice,
a playground of love, in the mind's eye,
in the land of dreams, where our fantasies
train us with monsters that are yet to come.
We can study well enough to master ourselves,
the hardest victory, as Aristotle says,
but the true test is the real world,
where the training is put to use
and the trainee survives or fails.