"I had a very formative moment when I was working at a children's hospital in Nashville. I guess I shouldn't say Nashville, that's very telling. At a very esteemed private university, commonly referred to as the ivy of the south, they have a children's hospital that is very famous for getting clientele from all across the state. I usually worked in a unit known as the myelosuppression unit, which is a unit that has special air filtering that's supposed to filter out as many microbes as possible from the rooms and hallways. So obviously the most vulnerable patients were put in there, mostly oncology patients and kids born with genetic disorders that would literally kill them if a dust mite fell on them and stuff like that.

But one day, I was volunteering there as part of the music therapy team and I met a little girl. She was really in a bad mood, I think it was her first day of chemo because she was hooked up to the IV. And people think chemo is just a one time thing for some reason a lot of the times, but chemo is a very slow process; you're hooked up to a machine throughout the course of the day and are very aware of the fact that you are being pumped with poison meant to just kill every cell in your body.

And child, or not, it's going to put you in a downer mood so obviously, we were tasked to help her feel better and try to cope with the stress that she had obviously accumulated from the IV being there and just distract her from everything that was going on. I talked to her and she really wasn't that talkative and didn't want to do much, so the strategy with that is usually you provide them options. She wanted to play battleship, and I'm telling you, that girl must have been psychic because she beat me in battleship five times in a row. Almost conclusively each time, I only sunk a total of three of her ships in all five of those games.

After we had finished battlefield, she had started getting a little tied till she saw this keyboard in the corner that I had brought as part of the music therapy team, and she says, like, 'Can I play that a little' and I said 'yeah, of course, it's for patients to play although you aren't scheduled, you can definitely play'. She started playing this little tune and she said, like, 'I used to know how to play Chopsticks on the piano but I forgot' and then she started talking about how her family at home were great piano players, but unfortunately ever since she got to the hospital she didn't have time to practice so she didn't get to relearn these pieces that had been very near and dear to her. So, I thought, I know Chopsticks, so I retaught her Chopsticks.

Over the course of the next few weeks when I saw her when I saw her again, I'd call her parents and ask them for the pieces and then I'd reteach her all those pieces. Until one day she says 'I want to make a new song on my own' and by then she is completely done with chemo, by the end of it, you're basically bedridden, you can't move at all and some people don't even have the strength to lift their arm.

But, she really wanted to play the piano, so I lugged it over there and brought into her room and she started playing this absolutely beautiful piece. I didn't know where it came from, because I thought 'where did she have the time to make this piece' because I just saw her yesterday. I asked her 'How did you come up with that? There's no way you could've made that in the course of the last day' and she was like 'Well, I just sort of thought of it in my head and it kind came out'.

I had asked her 'What did you think about to make you think of something that great?' and she said 'Well, I thought of my family and how much they mean to me, so I just kind of thought of that and I played whatever came to mind'. I think that was the moment in my life that I realized that love is a very powerful emotion, even if I can be kind of jaded about how people express their emotions to other people and how people can be fake about it; it helps to be sincere. Sincerity can come across in very beautiful ways and have a big impact on people, even if you never seen them in a month or so, in the case of this little girl." (Oxford, GA)

I recently had a heart to heart discussion with a friend about the power of love, and the above story touched me in my very core. I asked if I could share it anonymously and he said yes; I was just so inspired by this story that I just had to write about it.

Love is complex, it means many things to many people, yet we all know it when we see it. Love, to me, is the purest form of passion, it is a full surrender to what means the most to you, and in doing so, motivates you to do things that you never thought was possible. Love as a motivator forces you to change your perspective of the world, a perspective that is overwhelming more positive and jolly. This outlook then begins to change behavior and allows you to channel the emotions you feel into everything you do, creating a more beautiful product. In the case of the girl, it was a beautiful song. It was a channeling of her emotions of deep love for her family. Having a loved one brings great things, it brings caring, it breeds creativity, it brings out the best in us.

We can apply this to leadership, to the issues of our world today. If we truly love something, or someone, or a group of people, we want to preserve that, we want to foster their greatness. The issues we are experiencing today stem from the absence of love stem from an apathy that is rooted deep in our societal institutions and societal norms. We must rebuild the love for one another through contact, through interacting with people, but the interactions between people are becoming increasingly technical, only relating to school or work, or finances, not because we actually chase human connection. That is the first step in creating a better, more peaceful world.