Tuesday, December 09, 2003
Worth a Thousand Happy Romances
Many people have advice for me about love. Another teacher who works in my school confided in me one day, telling me how she loved a young man in high school once, but since there was so much pressure for her to focus on her studies, she said nothing to him about her feelings. Later on, she married a different man, and buried in her heart a question that has stayed alive all these years, always asking her what would have happened if she had told that young man about her feelings while she had the chance. She urged me to follow my heart, and when I love a woman, to let her know that I love her.
I confessed to my friend that this might not be a good time for me to talk about my own love story. The last time I actually sat down and told someone any details of my love stories over the last two years, I discovered hot coals of anger hiding in those memories, and the very act of breathing my tale flamed them into a small rage, furious with God for allowing such a string of bad luck to have come to pass. In some cases, my luck has been so bad, so tinged with irony and impossible coincidences, that it seems it could only have happened with the hand of heaven controlling it behind the scenes, purposefully arranging for David’s heart to be crushed several times in a row.
Now this is the part where my good friends tell me, “now David, don’t be so pessimistic. Those girls were not right for you. Surely there’s someone out there, and God just is helping you get ready for her.”
I appreciate their sentiments, and I want to believe them, but then I look around at the world and I wonder: 9 times out of 10, I see people married to someone they are not in love with, often still in love with someone they are not married to. Human lives overflow with regret.
Now the statistician in me gets to work, and starts calculating the odds that David Bowers, resident of Wuxi, China and author of the Brightwind website, will ever meet that mystery Miss Wonderful. He doesn’t think long before looking at me in the mirror over the rims of his glasses and saying, “Don’t get your hopes up.”
“You’d better get used to just being yourself” that face in the mirror tells me, “because you can never guarantee that any other person will ever make you happy.”
Yet good possibilities are always there, waiting in little bubbles to just pop over your head and drop something wonderful into your life. Every day, beautiful things happen, little miracles with heavenly signatures all over them, and yet many conveniently ignore them in determined self-pity.
But that’s where those impossible coincidences come in. You can see heavenly signatures on the bad things as well as the good when you realize how far most things are out of your control. Limitations are part of the very fabric we are made of, like a ray of light which can go on forever in one direction, but never in two at once.
To realize this is to admit that the joy of life is not in the happily-ever-after fairy tale we’ve been taught to believe. We so often expect that some great event or accomplishment will “make us truly happy” only to realize that we are still the same person after the big day has come and gone.
Some things don’t really matter then: perhaps you are reading this article as a happily married person, or perhaps you are struggling through every day of your marriage just to keep on going. Perhaps you have just fallen deeply in love with someone, or perhaps you have just been deeply hurt. Either way, you are yourself, and the one person that can never go away is you.
Our little rays of light speeding through the dark vacuum of time are limited in every way but one: straight ahead. Our bodies will eventually fall apart just as they were gradually put together, yet we will not fall apart with them. These rays of light, which we are, cannot be divided into pieces, analyzed or decomposed.
Indeed, we can only shine brighter, and we will always find our greatest joy in shining, as brilliantly as the sun, on whoever we are given to shine upon. A single act of genuine kindness is worth a thousand happy romances.
What do you think? If you have something to say on the subject (and I imagine you do), please leave a comment below.
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