Lose the Fear. Keep the Love.

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It’s easy when it’s like this. A perfect day under a perfect sun in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo, my favourite place in the world. Even the puffy clouds are only there to provide a welcome break from the heat, and tourists gasp with pleasure at their tables as the light dims. They applaud when the sun comes out, as though it can hear them.

And it can.

But not even the sun lasts forever. And every time my wife gets on a plane to visit her parents, I remember again what we all try to forget. One day, one way or another, we’ll say goodbye for the last time. How do you love without being afraid?

There’s nothing like the ruins of an empire to remind you that everything is temporary. What gives the place its gorgeous melancholy glow––the edges of the cobblestones worn smooth by ten million footfalls, the marble benches rounded and softened by six hundred winters––is the lives that have been spent and vanished, never to return. The radiance of a life is visible only when it’s lived as though it matters. And there I go again, putting up glass walls between the world and me.

We learn and then we forget.

The rapture of that single moment, the sun setting over the dome of St Peter’s or the bright day dawning over Rome’s seven hills, or me here in Piazza del Popolo, glutted with sun and…