The Notes Were Always Playing
Love doesn’t announce itself. It gives you something quieter. Here’s how to hear it.
Post 3 of 4 — Argument Two
Most people miss their loves because they’re waiting for the wrong thing.
They’re waiting for a moment of clear recognition.
A calling.
A sign that arrives fully formed and says: this is it. This is the thing.
Sometimes that happens. I’ve seen it.
But it’s the exception, not the pattern.
More often, love gives you a note.
A single subject that holds your attention longer than it should.
A problem you keep returning to when the assignment is over.
A way of processing the world — through patterns, through people, through making things — that shows up again and again, in different contexts, across years.
You hold that note. Then you get another and another. Over time, the pattern becomes audible. Not because you went looking for it, but because the love was already tuned to that register and couldn’t help recognizing it when it appeared.
This is not a dramatic process. That’s precisely why so many people miss it.
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Think back to what drew you as a child — before you had opinions about what was practical, before you understood what was impressive, before anyone told you what your abilities were supposed to be.
The subjects that held you. The way you naturally took in new information — through reading, through conversation, through taking things apart, through watching how people moved through rooms. The problems you couldn’t leave alone, even when no one was asking you to stay with them.
These are not random preferences. Researchers in education call them multiple intelligences. Others call them learning styles. But beneath those frameworks is something more specific and more yours. They are the earliest visible evidence of love. They are what I’ve come to call love indicators — the notes that were playing before you knew there was a song.
They didn’t go away when you grew up. They went quiet. Or you got better at ignoring them. Or the world got louder.
But they’re still there.
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When love is given even a small expression — when you act on it in ways that don’t yet look like anything significant — something happens.
The love responds. It deepens. It produces a quality of attention that feels different from effort, a pull back to the work that doesn’t require discipline to initiate.
This is why waiting to find your love before you act is exactly the wrong way to go about it.
You don’t locate the love and then start.
You start with whatever small evidence is already present — and the love reveals more of itself through the doing.
The notes have been playing your whole life. The question is whether you’ve been listening.
In my upcoming book The Second Start - Returning to What You Love, I describe how this worked in my own life — the specific pattern that turned out to be the love underneath all the different work I’ve done.
I’ll leave that for the pages. But I can tell you that when I finally saw it clearly, it didn’t feel like a discovery. It felt like recognition.
Like something I’d always known, finally said aloud.
That’s what’s waiting on the other side of paying attention.
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Next time: the argument for the skeptics — why the performance culture, in its pursuit of excellence, built a system that structurally prevents it.
The Second Start -Returning to What You Love is available for Preorder as an ebook. The paperback version will go live on 4/23.