Essay Contest Submission: Part 1

So as I mentioned in "So Much Going Through My Mind!", I am entering a contest for Real Simple Magazine, in which you have to write an article about how you discovered the meaning of love.  Each week, I'll post a portion of my article.  This is pretty much just the rough draft, so if anyone has any comments, suggestions it would be very much appreciated!  I want my essay to be perfect for the competition!  Here is the intro for my article:

  “I love chocolate.  I love summer.  I love shoes.”  We use the term “love” so frequently we forget its strength, its power, and the true meaning of love-we forget that without love we are lost.  The way we use the term “love” so commonly is like your drive home from work everyday…the first time you drive home from work you are very aware of your surroundings, you want to remember every detail of your drive home so you can remember it.  You have the joy of receiving a new job, you have the hopes and dreams flying through your mind 100 miles per hour of what this job is going to do for your life and how it’s going to make you stronger and change you for the better, and then once you are on your way home after that first day of work, you feel satisfied with your new accomplishment, and the path home is comforting since it brings you to a warm, happy place at the end of the day.  But after a while of working at your new job, you don’t pay attention to your surroundings.  You just go home.  And most likely, your mind isn’t flooded with how many new opportunities your new job will open for you—you’re instead thinking about who annoyed you at work that day, how exhausted you are…thinking about how you still have to make dinner, how you need to get around to doing chores.  That comforting path to your house is no longer special—this is what happens when we do something this frequently.  When we say “I love you” so loosely, we forget how powerful love is.  One really doesn’t realize how important love is—one can’t figure out just exactly what love means, and one can’t truly realize who they love, until you have lost something you have loved.  Just as if one day on your way home from work, driving with your mind on autopilot, the path home all of a sudden disappeared, and you weren’t able to get home.  We didn’t realize how important our paths were and how lost we were without them until we didn’t have them. Just like we are blind to what love means until we don’t have it.