Love is more than a feeling.

Love is a form of sweet servitude: fierce, imperfect and life-giving. A choice we make over and over.

This servitude engages all our emotions. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects that which is loved.

Love is how you untangle yourself from resentment. Courage is how you face the uncertainty of love. Wonder is how we return to the innocence of love. Passion is the trigger that love evokes to do our most profound and most meaningful work.

Love teaches us that when spirituality and maturity meet the heart can always remain wide open because to know love is to know heartbreak. There’s nothing left to defend. Life will obliterate you and you will find yourself eternally whole.

When I began this letter to the kismet fates of life, I focused a lot on love, because love is a topic that forever fills my days and nights in all its variations.

At a point, I thought I might start to love someone, and as quickly as that connection emerged, it faded. Neither of us is ready nor willing to compromise ourselves for the other. It didn't work... but the moment when it could have is immortalised in words, etched into the hearts of romantics. And still, my focus on love remains.

For 11 months now, I have lived on this island, ending each day with the same simple ritual. Lighting 7 large wax candles on the headboard of my bed. Sometimes only for a few minutes as I transition from the living world to the sleeping one. Other times for several hours as I write or read or both before blowing them out, each individually and at times in one fast rush of air from my mouth. There is a sweetness in this ritual born from my move to this island. A calm, peaceful way to close my days with love.

This year love has looked like having the most grown-up year of my life. I’ve been focusing on developing new structures; and setting the bar in my company, in my personal relationships, in my creative pursuit and productions, and in the ways that I live and what and where I call home. All of it is linked. Love, personal maturity, career, community, home…

Some of the biggest lessons this year so far have been: