Chris Stapleton is right: love is more precious than gold.

Love is my top priority. It can’t be acquired by anything other than love, by the opening and pouring of your soul into another person. It’s not worth anything to anyone else—it’s not a commodity. It can’t be exchanged for anything else. Love is only valuable to you and the person you share it with. It’s not something you can ‘have.’ Love can only be given and experienced. It’s what I seek, what I prioritize, what I try to attribute the majority of my attention to in this one life I get to live.

Because attention is a finite resource, and our great power is our ability to choose how it is allocated. I wrote about this recently. Attention is determined by the length of our life, our time; and by our biological capacity for processing information: our brain has a finite capacity for processing a certain amount of information in a given time. We can’t process every single thing we experience simultaneously in a given moment. We have to choose what to focus on. We get to choose.

A good portion of our waking hours are dedicated to basic activities like eating, working, driving, etc. So of our 16 hours each day, we only get a slice of ‘free time,’ when we can allocate our attention to whatever we wish. And love is my top priority. With all the time and attentional units I have left to me, I choose to maximize moments of love.

I am so grateful for the love in my life, and I choose to focus on that, not money or recognition or status. Love is above any competition for priorities. My writing and photography for TAV is an expression of my love for humanity and this planet. It is how I can contribute my love to the particle soup that is our local region of this vast universe. Any fun I have is with those I love, any pursuit or hobby is to experience love for life. I choose love.

As Chris says, it can’t be bought and it can’t be sold. It’s up to us how much attention we give love.