Marriage is de-facto absurd. You’re making a promise not just on behalf of yourself but on behalf of all your future selves, wholly without their opinion or consent. You’re saying not only do I love you now, but in twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years — even if I can’t predict anything else — I will love you then as well. It’s this absurdity that provides the foundation of marriage. It’s not something to overcome, but embrace. For by defying basic logic so clearly from the start, and by making a promise you can’t really make, you’re declaring your indifference to insidious reason. To those present and future thoughts which worm their way into the mind, seeding doubt because that’s all they know how to do. You welcome these worms. You savor this doubt. It’s the chasm that invites you to leap, the cliff that allows you to fly.
—
The more vivid the dream, the deeper the fear, for once you know what you want, you know what you don’t want to lose. This is why apathy is a defense against fear, as is contentment and its ambient peace.
—
Often, people fear losing what they don’t but could have more than they fear losing what they already possess. The child is always lost, if only by growing old. But what you fear as a parent is losing their future, and the future the two of you should share. The present moment is all anyone ever truthfully has, which is why it’s so readily taken for granted.
—
Telling the people that you love that you love them everyday is the gentlest way to acknowledge that tomorrow is never a given.
—
Commitment is a choice to cede future choices, to make them in advance, by not allowing yourself to make them at all. Commitment is the subjugation of feeling. It’s not promising you’ll always want to stay. It’s promising to stay even when you don’t want to.
—
We have to recover the meaning of ‘settling,’ as not the premature cessation of some passionate journey, but the decision to drill into the core of the earth, rather than endlessly circle it.