The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others."
— bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress
hooks wrote this while teaching at a time when love was not considered a serious intellectual or political concept — colleagues dismissed it as soft, unrigorous, beside the point. She insisted anyway that love was a practice, a daily choice, not a feeling that arrived on its own. That insistence is a form of gratitude: treating love as something worth protecting and returning to, again and again, even when institutions push back.
Reflection
Think about a specific person who made it easier for you to be honest or more fully yourself. What is one concrete thing you can do today to show them that their care mattered?