It means making decisions that align with your aliveness, even if they offend your ego, your upbringing, your pay check.

To choose an erotic life is not simply to chase pleasure or gratification; that would be to mistake Eros for Hedone. Rather, it is to say “yes” to the kind of friction that transforms.

Eros, in its ancient, Platonic sense, is the force that binds the soul to the world, that moves us toward beauty, mystery, and becoming. It is not reducible to sex, though it may include it. It is a metaphysical orientation: the decision, over and over again, to seek intensity over numbness, expansion over contraction, intimacy over control.

Life doesn’t begin at birth. Nor at conception. Nor at some abstract marker of consciousness or legality. It begins, in earnest, at the moment of trembling recognition . When something stirs beneath reason. When you want something – or someone – without being able to explain why, and you choose to move toward it. That is the erotic decision.

To suppress the erotic is to forgo passion, but also to forfeit independence. For what else is autonomy, if not the freedom to choose according to one’s own rhythm, one’s own longing, one’s felt truth?