“Best marriage proposal ever danced and lip-dubbed” (via Joel Sage)
I’m slightly surprised to be reblogging this, as it’s not the sort of thing I typically go for - I tend to prefer a darker, more cynical world view. But rewatching it last night with my beloved, I thought that, if a visitor to this planet asked what was best about human beings, you could do a lot worse than to show them this. And that is rather special.
Climping Beach today. Impossible to imagine anywhere more beautiful.
On Climping Beach with my beloved today - at the end of blissful weekend after an exhausting week.
I need to stop living for weekends.
When I am with my beloved for an extended time, I experience a kind of happiness I have never felt before - at any other time, or with anyone else.
So far, so cliched. What makes this assertion credible? Simply that, after a while (a week or two) with her, I find I am completely terrified of dying - obsessed with how it might happen, how soon, and how horrible it must be.
My main insight recently has been that, in my normal, everyday life (when I am with her less), I constantly (if almost always subconsciously) maintain a degree of both actual mess and potential (if still just about avoidable - and, generally, avoided) chaos in my life that makes it possible (or even, especially at times of panic, easy) to conceive of death as a comfort, or relief, or release. And indeed, death is often described in these terms in common parlance.
The happiness I feel when I am with my beloved makes me dread death utterly. But the rest of the time I am almost smug in the knowledge that this escape route is always there.
I now believe that an important driver of all the things I have done (ever since I was a little boy) to undermine my own happiness and stability has been a desire to overcome fear of death (which we can never know is not imminent) by making it something to welcome. And I wonder how many other people do this.
The prospect of giving up this fundamental way of structuring my life, and embracing happiness and (consequently, paradoxically) terror of death with my beloved, is both beautiful and unnerving.
Arundel today. Wonderful to be home again.
Essaouira. Bright sun on the coast of the Atlantic. Different shades of white on blue. Interesting angles. The end of the holiday.
