Well, tomorrow is my half year anniversary. It’s amazing how the time flies. On one hand it feels like we just got married yesterday. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine what life was like before I got married.
We still have a lot of fun together and it’s exciting to think about what the future holds. Parenthood doesn’t seem like such an impossibility anymore either. I would definitely like to have kids before my parents are too old to run around with their grandkids. I hope it’s not too late already.
It’s amazing how much time we spend together. I don’t know if this is just because we’re newlyweds or not, but we do almost everything together. Actually, the only thing we don’t do together (outside of work) is Men’s Group. For obvious reasons.
I’m glad I married a fun woman, or the situation could be bad. The only negative is that we definitely sacrifice our other friendships. I miss hanging with the guys and doing things on a whim and staying out late and so forth. It’s definitely worth the trade off, but I’m sentimental and sometimes it’s sad to think of the friendships I’ve had and how they’ve changed. I remember growing up how I used to think I would keep those friends forever. We were so close and had so much fun together, I couldn’t imagine a situation where we wouldn’t just keep doing stuff together. Now I understand the importance of family and how friends are extremely important, but not quite as stable. I’ve been lucky to have been surrounded by great friends at each stage of my life. Now I’m married to one, which is totally indescribable. Perhaps later in our lives we’ll go back to doing our own thing, and that’s the beauty of what we have now.
I’ve been listening to “Out of the Silent Planet” by CSL on tape lately. There is a scene where a hross describes its understanding of pleasure found in certain events in a being’s life. He uses the first encounter between Ransom and the hross and explains how at the time of the meeting, the feelings they had were not very pleasing. But as they got to know each other and each day grow more fond of each other, that event in their past became a pleasant memory. He goes on to say how each thing gets more pleasing as it reaches fulfillment in a man’s life. I can’t explain it right, so I’m going to find the passage and leave it to Lewis to explain. It’s worth pondering.
(FYI: Hmän= human)
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"Is the begetting of young not a pleasure among the hrossa?"
"A very great one, Hmän. This is what we call love."
"If a thing is a pleasure, a hmän wants it again. He might want the pleasure more often than the number of young that could be fed."
"You mean", he said slowly, "that he might do it not only in one or two years of his life but again?"
"Yes."
"But why? Would he want his dinner all day or want to sleep after he had slept? I do not understand."
"But a dinner comes every day. This love, you say, comes only once while the hross lives?"
"But it takes his whole life. When he is young, he has to look for his mate; and then he has to court her; then he begets young; then he rears them; then he remembers all this, and boils it inside him and makes it into poems and wisdom."
"But the pleasure he must to be content only to remember?"
"That is like saying 'My food I must be content to eat'."
"I do not understand."
"A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmän, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it.
You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?"
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"Undoubtedly," he said. "Maleldil [God] made us so. ... And how could we endure to live and let time pass, if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back - if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these ARE that day?"
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Excerpt from "Out of the silent planet", C.S.Lewis
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