Why weddings are part fiction:

We're all changing all the time

“Every morning when you wake up, [Ram Dass] said, you are reincarnated into new life. It’s like the sleep process is a kind of ego-death, or a hard reset on your brain and being. . . . No matter how similar this day may seem to the one that came before, it’s all new, and so are you. You can only ever be reincarnated. The question, then, is this: Who am I going to be in THIS lifetime, on THIS day?” – Liz Gilbert,

Letters From Love with Elizabeth Gilbert

Photo by Jeremy Wong Weddings on Unsplash

What would it be like to live this way, as if we—and our most significant relationships—are reincarnated each day?

***

I went to my first vow renewal a few weekends ago for college friends celebrating their ten-year anniversary in New York City. In a cocktail lounge in the lower east side, these friends spoke words to each other that blew open a door of possibility in my mind. It reminded me of the first wedding I went to when the couple exchanged personal words they had written instead of traditional vows, and I could suddenly picture myself taking part in a wedding I’d never wanted before.

A vow renewal points out the fiction in a marriage ceremony. When we pretend that words we speak once will apply always, we paint with a glittery brush over the day-to-day work that keeps a relationship going. A wedding captures a moment in time, but a marriage is a little different each day. After ten years, a lot can change.

Some of the threads from this couple’s wedding vows were still fully intact ten years later, but others were new. The vulnerability of their delivery hit me hardest. I saw how it’s possible to choke up and joke in layers at 40 that weren’t there at 30. What would David and I say and do differently now than when we married at 27? A lot, I think.

***

Some days change us more than others, but they all change us. And these two days in New York changed me. The noise and energy of the city scraped against my nervous system, the beauty of the vow renewal turned my sentiment dial up a few notches, and the lack of sleep amplified it all. I woke on Sunday morning feeling raw and right up against the pulse of life.

Flying home that day, I thought:

There’s no reasoning with life. Some of us get siblings who live as long as we do, and others don’t; some of us get parents who live until we are old ourselves, and others don’t; some of us get luckier in love, for any days that we have it, and we never know how many.

I hope I get to be 60.

I hope I’m still in love then, even though it won’t feel the same as it does now. I hope to find ways to celebrate what changes.

And when life defies my plans, and when the pain of the unexpected comes again, I hope I turn into a creaky old river boat with open walls, so even the hardest rain becomes part of what keeps me afloat.

Look for the next Creative Sort on Friday, June 6