Love, or at least love as I have come to understand it, has nothing to do with perfection. The world is bandaged together, a fractured thing at best. If you're lucky and you're attuned to it; if you're acclimated to life's rhythms and changes and seasons, you can see and find the light that leaks out of the cracks.
I believe in kindness and in a hard day's work (especially for the people I love), but I've never really understood the idea of destiny. Despite its majestic beauty, which can admittedly reduce me to awe and tears, life still seems mostly random from a ground-level view; even mercurial, asymmetrical, entropic. It rarely adds up. And this, this utterly familiar feeling of bewilderment, is exactly where I find my place as a writer.
Over and over again, I find myself drawn to clumsy narratives, bumbling human effort, awkward sincerity. I love the deeply flawed. I see myself that way, too. I don't grapple with some kind of monumental personal destiny that lies within a looming, grandiose, symmetrical construction. I am a fractured thing, warts and all. And I'd be willing to bet that you are, too. So is almost everything and everyone else I love.
I'm not sure I could sit with this feeling if I thought it all centered around some kind of righteous plan of perfection. Whatever joy I can lay claim to is found in the smallness, in the moments, in the clunky minutiae. That's where I find meaning, day after day, and it seems a lot more feasible than any kind of destiny. Moments where the dream of something beautiful, albeit abstract, persists, despite the world trying to impose itself like some kind of wet blanket. There are countless things in this world that call upon you to be cynical, but the unraveling wonder of the dream persists. There is goodness in this mess and it's not a design feature, it's you.
Or maybe I'm wrong. It wouldn't be the first time. Hell, most of us are. Maybe everything is unraveling in a way that will prove the cynics right, or cement the notion that the hand of fate is somehow at the helm of this herky-jerky ride and there's little we can do to change it. Maybe it's all going to hell - families, hopes, economies - and I'm in some kind of blissful denial about the gravity of the moment, foolishly refusing to see the bigger picture.
But even if that were the case, I would still tend to find so deep meaning in the little moments in this ragged world. It doesn't feel like it's collapsing, even though I can't make sense of it most of the time. And sure, it could be that I'm naive or that I'm thinking small, but I chalk it up to something else entirely: I chalk it up to Love. Not the kind you see in those phony rom-coms or hallmark hogwash, but the real, messy bunglesome stuff you see and feel in the everyday moments that find their way into your heart. It's not about perfection. It never was. It's not even about making sense of any of it. It's about finding the light in the cracks.
I'm not dismissing the sadness that comes with this world, or even the notion that this whole unfolding spectacle could be guided by something I can't even begin to understand. I'm simply here to tell you that even in the midst of the lows and sadness, in a world rife with covid tests, economic insecurities and looming unknowns, I see clear evidence that beauty resides in so many small things, moment to moment. It's not perfect and it's not destiny, but it's Love. Fractured, beautiful Love.
And that's more than enough for me.
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