“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”

~ Mary Oliver

Stares of affection. The little butterflies gather in your stomach from the excitement and eagerness to see him.

You can’t stop thinking about his smell. Oh, he usually smells like a combination of spice and carefully calculated danger. His warmth envelopes you and your skin tingles from his slightest touch. Nothing compares to the brushing of his lips to your ear as he tells you how much he has missed you and longed to hold you in his arms. You are so lost in delight that you barely notice the darkness as it creeps up. Time drifts away and you regretfully part.

Your excitement slowly builds in anticipation for your next encounter. Upon waking, your thoughts are dripping of him. You can barely wait for your day to begin. The birds sing a slow sweet sing. The flowers almost seem to be in technicolor. You can smell the roses from here. You try to avoid the appearance of skipping as your laughs turn to giggles and your long lost girlishness returns.

Ahh. Love is in the air.

Love is a powerful emotion that can transform the common man into a paradigm of virtue. When you love someone or something, you see their highest and greatest good. You celebrate their potential and value their uniqueness. You search for and find the good, the thing that sets them apart. Their every action is laudable.

As time goes by, we lose the motivation to endear our lovers to ourselves. We stop seeking and finding and stop celebrating the tiny things. The appreciation for loveliness gets lost and our enthusiasm dies a slow, painful death.

It’s the same with our selves and our lives.

Once we get accustomed to our new ventures and passions, we allow them to become normal and we forget to look for the loveliness that we once cherished. As our romantic liaisons require constant attention and tenderness, our creative strivings also need nurturing.

We get bored with our lives and jobs and businesses and do not inject the effort to fall back in love as we should.

Finding the things to fall in love with in our lives every day is what makes life sweet. We have an obligation to seek out the juiciness in life. Squeeze out every last drop and drink it up. We are worth it.

Romancing yourself and celebrating love is no small feat and something that takes a little bit of practice. Keeping the romance fresh in your life takes focus–one that pays off in multiples. Boost your creativity and your job by entering into a live affair with your daily life.

Here are eight tips for having a love affair with your life:

1. Look for the things that make your life beautiful. What are the things that make your life a work of art? What things cause you joy and happiness when you encounter them in your life? Pay attention to what things give you that feeling of exhilaration.

2. Spend time noticing the things that you once loved and enjoyed. Relish them again. Revisit and savor the experiences that you once took pleasure in. They have the potential to be pleasurable again.

3. Study and date your life. When you begin to fall in love with someone everything g about them is new and interesting. You can’t wait to see them and learn more. You spring out of bed every morning to see what new discovery awaits you. Why don’t you try that with your days?

Spring out of bed excited about what the day brings and try to see if you can find something new to learn. Although your days may look the same, there is always something new and different that you can glean from each one. Pay special attention and when you find it. Study it. Know how it feels, the things that bring you that feeling and how to channel it when you want to feel that way again.

4. Focus on the good and lovely things about your life. When things become routine, we tend to focus on what’s not going right. If you take the time to look for the things that are good and lovely in your life, your love quotient will skyrocket.

5. Appreciate the things that are unique about your life. What things are unique in your life? What experiences, occurrences, people pepper your life that may not be in everyone else’s. Or that contributes to your life differently. New love is always able to see the uniqueness in their partner and rave about it. Identify what is unique in your life and rave about that.

6. Expect and search for miracles in the everyday. Make a concerted effort to see the changes in others and the things that people work hard to do. Praise them and revel in their beauty.

7. Let life embrace you. Leave space for surprises and wild acts of compassion. Take the surprise hugs with glee and fall into the arms of life as new, interesting things get thrown your way. Accept it and learn to live it. It makes life much more fun.

8. Dream about the future. Float away on daydreams about what life will be like. New love invites dreaming about how you would like things to be. How glorious things will be when you’re spending your life with that other. Indulge yourself and enlarge your dreams for the future.

Life should be a grand, majestic affair. After all you only get one shot. So make it the best, most audacious one you have.

Life doesn’t want a limp and flaccid approach, life wants you to step up boldly, filled with passion and power. Taking a love affair approach to your life guarantees that you will maintain a juiciness and excitability that reaps sweetness.

Finding love and celebrating it in your daily life guarantees that you will never be bored. Your life will be rich, bold and filled with possibility.

Injecting wild, passionate adventures across time will result in a fuller bolder and richer experience for you and everyone you come into contact with.

I wish you a wild and passionate love affair.

Your turn: what other ways can you create a love affair with your life?

Love elephant and want to go steady?

Sign up for our (curated) daily and weekly newsletters!

Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photo: courtesy of the author