Time & Perspective Quote by Kent Nerburn

Nerburn writes about love like a visiting weather system: inevitable, unowned, and indifferent to your plans. The line works because it strips romance of its favorite illusion - control - and replaces it with a more uncomfortable ethic: attention without possession. “Time,” “season,” “reasons” sounds gentle, almost pastoral, but it’s doing something stern. It demotes love from prize to process. You don’t win it; you witness it.

The list of failed strategies - “bribe,” “coerce,” “reason” - is pointed. Those are the tools of commerce, force, and debate, the everyday methods we use to get outcomes from people. Nerburn’s subtext is that modern relationships often smuggle in these tactics under nicer names: negotiation, optimization, “communication” as leverage. The quote refuses that transactional model. If love is real, it won’t be impressed by your résumé, your apologies, or your logic. It arrives on its own authority, and it leaves with the same.

Then comes the pivot from helplessness to responsibility: “embrace it when it arrives and give it away.” He’s not advocating passivity; he’s advocating stewardship. The context here is Nerburn’s broader spiritual-humanist sensibility, where love is less a private feeling than a practice of generosity. “Give it away when it comes to you” reads like a corrective to scarcity thinking - the fear that if you don’t clutch tightly, you’ll lose everything. He implies you lose it faster by gripping it, and you honor it by circulating it. That’s not just romantic advice; it’s a worldview that treats love as a gift you can’t hoard without corrupting.