Fresh snow falling this week was so beautiful and white. I’ve always loved it when snowflakes flutter through the air. But is that really love?Certainly, loving snow and loving your children are not the same thing. They are not even comparable. Whatever love means in terms of people, loving something as impersonal as snow is really about happiness, not love.

Standing in the swirl of fresh snow makes me happy. It delights my senses and yields an aura of peace and beauty. We can say that we love the snow, or we love chocolate, because we enjoy them and they make us feel happy. But it’s quite different from loving a person.

The problem is, we simply don’t have the language to say it another way. The verb “to love” refers to an act of will based in emotion. Happiness is different. It’s a state of being. We don’t “happy” something and we don’t “fall into” happiness.  How you say it really doesn’t matter much until you start to look deeper into what it means to love a person, place or spiritual ideal.

When sorting out complicated feelings, it may be helpful to recognize the difference.