February 2015 – Page 3 – A Design So Vast

Love Looks Like This – this beautiful post by Sarah Bessey brought tears to my eyes. Such perfect timing for our Here Year theme this month. Sarah writes that “lifelong love is actually most built throughout the hours of the day, all twenty four of them, in the ordinary moments of our humanity.” Oh, yes. Lifelong love isn’t what we imagined it would be, at least not for me. It’s so much more multifaceted, complicated, and beautiful.

I read Meghan Daum’s The Unspeakable and loved it. The book is hilarious and wise and I adore Daum’s voice. My review – spoiler, I loved it! – will be on Great New Books in a few weeks.

Embarking on a Voyage – Barnstorming is one of my favorite blogs, and this post is a great example of why. The future is a murky mess. We can only navigate by our wits and by what we can hear in the fog. This short piece is so beautiful.

Matt and I watched The Affair over the holiday break. I don’t watch much TV, but that’s changing lately because the qualify of shows such as The Affair have really captured my attention (I also love Homeland and House of Cards). I was riveted by the Affair despite finding the two central protagonists quite unlikeable. I’m particularly fascinated by the notion of what we remember and why, and about how our recollections of an experience as filtered through our own subjectivity (and thus may differ from those of others).

I write these Things I Love Lately posts approximately monthly. You can find all of the previous ones here.

It’s February, and the Here Year is drawing to a close. It’s hard to believe. This month’s topic is love. I can’t wait to read what Aidan has to say on this (substantial) topic and to spend some time thinking and writing about it myself.

I believe that the basic building block of love is presence.

I wrote before that friendship is made of attention and that’s actually true for all kinds of love. Love underlies all, doesn’t it? It’s the alpha and the omega, the reason we get up in the morning, what we think about before we go to bed at night. I don’t just mean romantic love. I mean love for our families and our friends, love for our work and our hobbies, love for the things we read and think about and do and the people we encounter.

Just last week, in answering questions designed to build vulnerability and hence closeness, I asserted that what I really want out of friendship is someone who stays near, no matter what. This is true of love. What love means to me is being heard and listened to, someone standing with me in the kitchen while I unload the dishwasher, someone remembering to inside out their socks before putting them in the laundry just because I asked them to, someone believing that I meant well even if I messed up.

Love is abiding.

And love, like life itself, is made up of a zillion small moments. Years ago I wrote about the dailiness of life, observing that “we build our lives – our commitments, our desires, our identities – through quotidian acts that can feel infinitessimal and meaningless as we enact them.” I think you could substitute the word “love” for “life,” and it is absolutely as true.

Love is made up of the smallest acts.

Whit and I read a wonderful book this weekend called On a Beam of Light by Jennifer Berne. It tells the story of Albert Einstein’s life and at one point talks about how he was interested in things enormous (the universe) and tiny (the atom). That’s what love feels like to me in some ways: simultaneously unfathomably big and exceedingly miniscule. Both of these characterizations make it hard to really grasp. But I’m pretty sure love is composed of our attention, and is built out of an infinite number of small things.

What does love mean to you?

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