This entry will be a bit scattered. My parents had their 50th wedding anniversary recently, and I had to give a couple different speeches in different occasions. And in preparation for that I wrote some notes. These are those notes.

Dad took me places I didn’t want to go. My mom showed me places I wanted to be.

I wanted to share some thoughts about my parents and about their marriage.

I never wanted to be like my dad. That was a hard thing for me to realize, and I think it was hard for him too. Partly I was just too stubborn and independent to want to follow anyone, and in that way I think I was being like my dad. But I never felt that I could do what he did or be who he was. I didn’t have the same capabilities or desires. And we fought about that a bit when I was younger. But he was always willing to be disagreed with, willing to be surprised, even willing to be wrong. And that meant he was always my dad, and that we were alike, even when we went different directions on things.

I did want to be like my mom. She never pushed me to be like her, she just set an example that I fell in love with. I loved so many of things she loved and wanted to share in them. Books, music, art, photography, her love of nature and gardens and living things, her appreciation of simple comforts, traditions, good food, unpretentious pleasures, independence, self-confidence, reserve, and a very absurd and sometimes dark sense of humor. She was very wry and very careless, thoughtful but unconcerned. She worried about other people but never seemed to worry about herself.

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There has been so much argument and pain and confusion and naiveté and disappointment over marriage and what it is and isn’t and how great or how much of fraud and trap it is.

Marriage through the years has had a lot of bad press. And people have earned that bad press, so it’s not like it’s unrealistic. But I was never convinced by all the arguments and bribes and alternatives and escapes and denunciations and declarations and marketing and counter marketing.

I always, almost more than anything, wanted to get married and be in a partnership with someone else. Why? Because of my parents. I had seen with my own eyes what marriage meant and what it could be. My parents aren’t mushy, sentimental people. My dad just threw away the love letters my mom sent him after he had read them. He’s a wonderful man, but there isn’t any poetry in him. And my mother is one of the most even-keeled, reserved, straightforward women I have even known. But in spite of all that, you could not avoid seeing their love for one another.

I knew how much my parents loved each other. I lived with them for 18 years, and with only them for the last four. And being that close to someone for that long, there’s a lot you realize that really annoys you about them. You learn all their habits and idiosyncrasies that you can’t stand, from the way they chew to the things they say that drive you crazy. So I knew exactly what there was about both of them that made them almost impossible people to live with, much less be married to.

But I never saw anyone, no romantic couple in movies, no passion or love affair in any TV show or book that could compare to what I had seen in my own home. I saw them fight, of course, I saw both of them be idiots, I saw them criticize and embarrass each other, I awe them accuse and annoy each other, I saw them be worried about and frustrated by each other. And yet I have never seen anyone who was as absolutely and continuously in love with one another as my parents.

I saw their partnership firsthand, up close, and what it meant to them and what it meant to everyone around them. Their friends, their family, their neighbors, their church, their coworkers, their patients. I saw their love and I saw the consequences of their love in the world around them and what they were capable of because of that partnership.

I saw my dad come home from work and I saw my mom greet him each day. I saw him stand and hold her, and I saw them smiling and humming and kissing in a way that was completely disgusting and embarrassing to a teenager. I had a room right next to theirs, and so I knew exactly how much time they spent fighting and arguing, and I also knew exactly how much time they spent snuggling and smooching and reading to each other and talking together late at night.

And it was a little embarrassing. But not to them. Instead it was me who was embarrassed and ashamed to be so exposed and inadequate. They were part of something so strong and so overwhelming and meaningful that me as their son was outside of it. And I was the one who was embarrassed to be standing in the presence of something absolutely blinding like that.

That was the kind of love my parents had. It was like the sun. It was hard to look at. But it gave life and warmth and growth to everything around them. And it didn’t matter what they were like, how annoying and imperfect and impossible they could be. Nothing could possibly reach them inside it. They were completely secure and unashamed inside it. It was an irresistible picture of the power of faith and love.

That picture they presented extended to their children. I never really felt like I wanted children, I never felt that burning desire or urge, but I never for a moment bought the arguments and narratives against parenthood. That it meant the end of romance, that kids were a burden and a trap, that they were competing with my own interests or wellbeing, or that they would restrict my own greatness and pleasure and freedom. I knew, by my own experience that that was false.

Not because the hardships of parenthood were ever hidden from me by my parents. I knew that I myself was quite the handful. I knew how hard it was to be a parent because I was my parents’ kid. But they also couldn’t hide how amazing parenthood was, how much it meant to them, what a struggle and adventure it was, what joy it brought to them despite everything, how absolutely worth doing it was.

I knew that if I had kids, I would love them, and it would make my life greater, even if I didn’t know what it felt like to want them yet. I knew that it was real, that it was out there. Even when I was angry at or frustrated with my own parents, I knew what parenthood was meant to be. They showed me that. And I could never forget it. Their lives, their marriage, and their parenting was an argument that I could never defeat.

Nothing that happened to me in my whole life could make me forget what I had seen with my own two eyes in my own home between my parents and between them and their children. Nothing could ever change that, nothing could take it away. And I never saw anything greater. I never saw any fame or fortune or power or pleasure that could compare to what was alive in my own parents’ home. Even with all its hundreds of imperfections it swept the competition.

Even if I walked away from them and was a terrible son, even if we neglected each other or betrayed each other, I knew too much to forget.

There are few things last in this world. Monuments fail, people are forgotten, honors lose their meaning, knowledge becomes outdated and useless, happiness passes, wealth runs out, fame is forgotten, jobs can be replaced. But you can’t build or legislate or buy or award what my parents have done and what they have made.

My parents built a fifty year living monument to the power of a loving marriage. That is a miracle of art, of living, of endurance, cooperation, struggle, painful honesty and revelation, and of genuine human goodness in a world of pain and fear and uncertainty and disappointment and change. And that is the closest thing to a glimpse of divine truth and goodness and beauty that we will see in our lives on earth.

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A marriage like this is a like a cathedral. It is a living and tangible argument for the power of romantic love between a man and woman and what it means when those two seperate halves of humanity are reunited. It is an unfolding of the consequences of the most powerful human relationship in existence. And it’s also the most basic and ordinary thing in the world. My parents aren’t great. They’re ordinary people who have lived perfectly ordinary lives.

No offense to my dad, but he would collapse in an instant without my mom. And my mom was able to be and do everything she did because of what my dad meant and did for her.

What does it mean to live a successful life

What can endure, what makes us be seen, what gives life meaning, what makes our lives matter?

Achievements, wealth, fame, awards, degrees, success, status, some law, some holiday, some chapter in a history book, some monument.

We think we’re the center of the universe because we’re the center of our universe; we think we’re so much greater than we are that we can hardly picture the world without us.

Our clothes, our cars, our houses, our titles, our degrees, our reputation, all protect us from the reality of what small, weak, vulnerable, organic creatures we are.

I learned the power and greatness of ordinary lives from both my parents. Both parents hammered home to me the greatness and value of ordinary lives and people. Dad through being a doctor. Mom through her understanding of, care of, and appreciation of others. Small people. Small things. Small places. Small moments.

You can be a massive success but have no friends, no one who knows you, no one who truly misses your absence or passing. However many people there are who know about you, Who knows you and cares about you in such a way that you are an essential and meaningful part of their world and they can’t imagine the world without you? That’s a much rarer achievement.

So many of us live a much more tenuous existence than we would like to admit. We’re only one bad turn from losing our happiness, our wealth, our status. And everyone’s lives are like that.

All monuments fail, all people are forgotten, all honors lose their meaning, all knowledge becomes outdated and useless, all happiness passes, all wealth runs out and , all fame is forgotten, all jobs can be replaced. Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before.

What is the measure of a meaningful life, a life that endures; what is a sure defense against the enormous void of our finitude and imperfection and how much smaller our reality is than what we imagine ourselves to be?

Your life alone, no matter what you accomplish, can’t matter enough to survive against those odds. There’s no such thing as a lone wolf. Only rabid wolves are ever alone. The lone wolf is weak, it has no protection against the world or the future. It has no future. Only in connection to others do we become complete ourselves.

We often put conditions on our happiness and the meaning of our lives. I can only be happy if I have this kind of spouse, this many children, or if my children turn out like this, or if I can live here or have this nice of a house, or if I have this kind of job or can spend my time doing this thing that I like. We hold our lives hostage with all the demands and preconditions we place on it. Only this can make my life matter, only this will make me happy, I must be this, do this, see this, be seen as this.

My parents have spent their lives trying to teach me not to let myself fall into that trap. They’ve showed me where meaning and happiness can be found. My dad worked hard and never worried about trying to be important. In fact I think he was deliberately trying not to be so he wouldn’t have to bother with worrying about his own reputation. Be was always doing everything he could to disabuse people of any expectations they had of him to be a great man. And by a strange turn of fate, that turned out to be exactly how you become a great man. Not by chasing your own greatness, but by casting that aside as a distraction from the real business of living life.

My mother showed me the place where meaning and happiness live. In little pleasures, small moments and places of beauty. She was never trying to be the best mom or have the best house. She was loving what it was good to love: her children, her garden, her neighbors, music, books, food, special times together.

My parents showed me two visions of happiness and meaning. Meaning and happiness out there, meaning and happiness in here.