I had a eureka moment today.  I was staring at my notebook, swiveling around in my chair, hand grasping chin, sighing, and suddenly the missing piece of the puzzle flashed.  It just pours out from head to paper, everything comes together, I am exhilarated.  If only work was full of moments like these!

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The other day I was in a store listening to a love song being played, and it occurred to me how these songs just didn’t belong to me; I can’t claim them, in the sense that, I have no face to attach to the words, no ecstatic or burning or dreamy memories evoked.  All those love songs are empty and fictional to me as of yet.  They are flat.  Not by some principle, but merely by lack of corresponding experience.  And meanwhile at least half (three quarters?) the music, literature, and movies of the whole world go on and on about this one topic.

Some people talk about finding a spouse like it’s a sequential step in life’s progression, like losing your baby teeth, or going to college.  But it’s really not.  Think about all the people you’ve run into today, this week, or even over the course of your life.  From the random people you just passed by on the street to those you know more intimately.  Each with their own strangenesses, peculiarities.  And now think of all your own strangenesses, which you know deeply.  How many of them could you imagine being your spouse?  For those strangenesses to complement each other.  It would take a miracle, for you two to happen to get to know each other, for you to like them, for them to like you back, to still like each other after the dreamy glow fades and the flaws become plain.  Maybe not for some, but for those of us who consider ourselves more strange than most, quite a miracle.  In my eyes it’s a search problem with an infinitesimal match rate.  In light of this, what a mystery that so much of the world is married!  Miracles abound when we look long enough to notice them.

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