24 Ways To Fall In Love With The World Around You (When You Need A Break From Romantic Love)

1. Fall In Love With Learning

Fall in love with exploring new ideas, constructing new thoughts, piecing together a new framework for how the world around you works and what you can do with that knowledge. Go back to school, take a course you’ve always wanted to take or finally pick up that book that you’ve been meaning to read for too long. Fall in love with expanding your mind in ways that you never even knew were possible.

2. Fall In Love With Traveling

Fall in love with movement. Become enamoured with shifting landscapes and changing scenery and the enticing people who populate each new place. Open your mind up to cultures that differ from your own and let go of the prejudices you’ve built up over so many years. Instead of focusing on the disarray of your internal world, focus on the enchantment of the one that surrounds you. And allow yourself to be changed by it.

3. Fall In Love With Your Body

Fall in love with all that your body can do for you – for the mountains it can scale, the miles it can traverse, the people it can love and the home that it gives you inside yourself. Learn to treat your body with the proper respect it deserves – with the food that nourishes it, the activity that exhilarates it and the conscientiousness that allows it to thrive. Stop neglecting the most permanent home that you have, and learn to take care of it instead.

4. Fall In Love With Your Work

Fall in love with the projects you haven’t yet started, the initiative you haven’t yet taken, the changes that you’re capable of making and the impact you have the power to have. Instead of letting your work happen to you, start pouring your heart into your livelihood – and watch the incredible results that follow.

5. Fall In Love With Art

Fall in love with the passion, the enchantment, the creativity of the world that surrounds you. Immerse yourself in the aesthetic beauty that is available to you in abundance and then match that creativity with your own. Learn to channel your experience of the world into whichever art form suits you best, and surprise yourself with your own ability to design and invent.

6. Fall In Love With Nature

Fall in love with the overwhelming beauty of the natural world that surrounds you. Strap on a backpack, rent a compass and canoe, and take yourself completely off the grid. Realize how few of your problems stretch beyond the hustle and bustle of your day-to-day life and take solace in that fact. Realize that nature is far too enchanting a beast to let petty distractions get in the way of your experience of it.

7. Fall In Love With Helping People

Fall in love with a charity, a community, a population that you’re capable of helping and growing. Realize that the impact you can have on other people is more significant than you could ever have imagined – and glean a sense of purpose from that. Realize that you are not the only person you exist to nurture and serve.

8. Fall In Love With Bettering Yourself

Fall in love with challenging yourself, with growing yourself, with forcing yourself to rise up to always one more obstacle that has been standing in your way. Read those books you have been meaning to invest in. Start that fitness routine you’ve been putting off. Actually get down to the core of what it’s going to take to make yourself feel proud of the person you are, and then do that. Fall in love with the process of becoming more yourself.

9. Fall In Love With Making People Laugh

Fall in love with humor. Allow yourself to revel in the absurdity of the world that surrounds you and share your offbeat findings with others. Get together with friends you haven’t visited in years – the ones who make your abs ache with laughter – and allow yourself a night to let loose. To laugh at all the things that usually trouble you, and realize how little power they have. To realize how little anything matters when you have people to laugh about it with.

10. Fall In Love With Literature

Fall in love with reading. Pick up the books you’ve been neglecting for too long and open yourself up to someone else’s vision of how the world works. Immerse yourself in the adventures you’ll never take, the opinions you’ve never entertained and the sheer wonder of how much more there always is to learn and understand.

11. Fall In Love With Reflection

Fall in love with re-hashing your own story. Instead of barreling aimlessly forward, take some time to reflect on where you’ve been and what you can learn from those experiences. Discover how many answers you’re already holding onto if you simply take the time to seek them out within yourself. And then move forward with a much greater awareness of where you want to go next.

12. Fall In Love With Movement

Fall in love with physical activity. Take up a sport, a physical challenge or an outdoor adventure that gets your blood pumping and your heart racing. Take full advantage of the impact that endorphins have on your overall sense of wellbeing and refuse to take your body for granted again. Push its limits (safely) and surprise yourself with all that it can do.

13. Fall In Love With Mysteries

Fall in love with all that you have yet to understand. Research oddities, plunge into confusions, take it upon yourself to tackle some of the great unanswered questions in life. You may not end up with any answers, but you’ll learn to love the process of questioning. You’ll learn to tackle all future problems from every available angle.

14. Fall In Love With Healing

Fall in love with whatever it takes to make you feel whole and complete again. Take up meditating, exercising, journaling, running – anything that brings you closer to who you know yourself to be at your core. In many ways, we will be healing and hurting our entire lives. So there’s no shame in taking some time to get the process right.

15. Fall In Love With Experimentation

Fall in love with the fluidity of your own identity. Loosen your grip on the person you know yourself to be and take up temporary residence inside the mind of who you could become instead. Try out new identities, new practices, new routines and new methods of self-expression. You may find that you’ve been suppressing certain parts of yourself for far too long.

16. Fall In Love With Expression

Fall in love with telling your own story. Allow yourself to write it out, run it out, draw it out, sing it out, to get it out in any way that feels genuine and natural to you. Stop telling yourself that your scars are all yours to hold onto. And allow yourself the opportunity to genuinely connect with others who’ve been through much of what you have been through.

17. Fall In Love With Independence

Fall in love with your lack of constraints. Become enamored with your ability to go anywhere, do anything, become anyone you want to become, without having to factor in somebody else. Recognize the unique opportunity you have to explore freely and openly, and take advantage of it while you still can.

18. Fall In Love With A Community

Fall in love with a group of people. Learn what it means to contribute to something that is bigger than yourself and to be a part of something that you could not construct on your own. Learn to give and take from others in a way that is genuine and healthy and learn to let yourself be comfortable with that. Learn to care for a cause and a group of people that is much, much bigger than yourself.

19. Fall In Love With Music

Fall in love with people whose melodies and lyrics express what your mind simply cannot – and then learn to speak their language. Fall in love with the enchantment, with the power, with the overwhelming connection that music allows us and incorporate its practice into your every day life. Allow music to bring you to places that your mind would not otherwise go, and love the process. Appreciate all that it adds to living.

20. Fall In Love With Questioning

Fall in love with not having answers – with still having boxes to tick and queries to consider and an entire life of living left to do. Learn to make peace with not knowing everything yet, and to enjoy the process of discovering. Embrace this as a way of living – because not knowing all of the answers will be a constant for the remainder of your life.

21. Fall In Love With Planning

Fall in love with learning what you do have the power to change, and taking concrete action to do so. Fall in love with the process of constantly striving to achieve more for yourself, and to appreciate all that you accomplish as you go.

22. Fall In Love With The Pursuit Of Something Bigger

Fall in love with a project or a purpose or a question that is bigger than yourself and your personal interests. Devote yourself to the furthering of whatever it is that you have thrown yourself into, and appreciate the impact you are capable of having on something that is so much more significant than your own petty problems and concerns.

23. Fall In Love With Not Knowing What Comes Next

Fall in love with uncertainty. Learn to appreciate the fact that we are rarely given all of the answers in life but that we do not need them in order to move forward. Learn to feel excitement rather than fear at the prospect of not knowing what’s coming next, and allow your life to unfold at the pace that it’s meant to.

24. Fall In Love With Yourself

Fall in love with the single person who has always been present to fight for you. Allow yourself to finally take pride in the choices that you’ve made, the challenges you’ve undertaken and the ways in which you’re constantly working to better yourself. At the end of the day, your relationship with yourself rests at the core of every other relationship you’ll engage in. So make sure you’re starting from a healthy place – and fall in love with yourself first and foremost.