Buddha once said that just as we can know the ocean because it always tastes of salt, we can recognize enlightenment because it always tastes of freedom. There’s no essential difference between real love and enlightenment. While many people see commitment as a trap, its healthy versions actually free both lovers, bring out the flavor of their true selves, and build a love that is satisfying, lasting, and altogether delicious.

Read more at Oprah.com.

A nice companion piece, also by Martha Beck: “How to Love More By Caring Less” (very Buddhist in its approach as well).

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. … It does not occur to anyone to expect a single person to be “happy,”—but if he marries, people are much surprised if he isn’t! (And for that matter it really isn’t at all important to be happy, whether single or married.) Marriage is, in many respects, a simplification of one’s way of life. … Marriage is … a questioning of the strength of and generosity of each partner and a great new danger for both.

… a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude, and shows him this confidence, the greatest in his power to bestow. A togetherness between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement which robs either one party or both of his fullest freedom and development. But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes is possible for each other to see the other whole and against a wide sky!

I guess I used to think of myself as a lone agent, who made certain choices and established certain alliances with colleagues and friends. Now, though, I see things differently. I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. … Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.

And though history has made us self-conscious in order to enhance our survival prospects, we still have deep impulses to erase the skull lines in our head and become immersed directly in the river. I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experience, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a hard challenge, or when an artist or a craftsman becomes one with the brush or the tool. It happens sometimes while you’re playing sports, or listening to music or lost in a story, or to some people when they feel enveloped by God’s love. And it happens most when we connect with other people.

I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year.

Read the full article.

“Compassion is the chief law of human existence.” —Dostoyevksy

Everyone has a breaking point, or a point of no return, even if they say they don’t.

For example, your partner says, “I’ll always love you.”

They certainly think they do … until the day they don’t … maybe because you hurt them badly, or they experienced something they couldn’t have conceived of before.

We think we know ourselves, and we trust our intuition. Yet our intuition is deeply (or predictably) irrational. Intuition is informed by cultural assumptions, past experience, prejudice, wish fulfillment, short-term goals, sentimentality, and our wish for how things should be, or ought to be.

People tell you, “I’m here to support you.” And they really believe that.

Until the day comes when they have to serve (or save) themselves—or perhaps support a higher mandate instead.

We have the highest ideals and the best of intentions. But none of us are to be trusted. Things change.

That’s why it’s so amazing when we continue to trust, and continue to hope.

And it’s why I’m so deeply affected by (and admiring of) people who remain kind and compassionate through it all—through the change, the disappointment, the brokenness. It’s so hard to take, and so hard to remain open.

From Solitude by Anthony Storr:

Many fortunate people do make intimate relationships which continue until death, and which constitute their major source of happiness. But even the closest relationship is bound to have flaws and disadvantages, and it is often because people do not accept this that they are more unhappy than they need to be, and more inclined to abandon one another. If it is accepted that no relationship is ever ideal, it makes it easier to understand why men and women need other sources of fulfillment. As we have seen, many creative activities are predominantly solitary. They are concerned with self-realization and self-development in isolation, or with finding some coherent pattern in life. The degree to which these creative activities take priority in the life of an individual varies with his personality and talents. Everyone needs human relationships; but everyone also need some kind of fulfillment which is relevant to himself alone. Provided that they have friends and acquaintances, those who are passionately engaged in pursuing interests which are important to them may achieve happiness without having any very close relationships.

From Solitude by Anthony Storr:

Human beings need a sense of being part of a larger community than that constituted by the family. The modern assumption that intimate relationships are essential to personal fulfillment tends to make us neglect the significance of relationships which are not so intimate. …

The fact that a man is part of a hierarchy, and that he has a particular job to carry out, gives his life significance. It also provides a frame of reference through which he perceives his relation with others. In the course of daily life, we habitually encounter many people with whom we are not intimate, but who nevertheless contribute to our sense of self. …

Relationships of this kind play a more important role in the lives of most of us than is generally recognized. When people retire from work in offices or institutions, they miss the familiar figures who used to provide recognition and affirmation. It is generally accepted that most human beings want to be loved. The wish to be recognized and acknowledged is at least as important. …

People who have a special need to be recognized, perhaps because their parents accorded them little recognition in childhood, are attracted to office life for this reason. …

Intimate attachments are a hub around which a person’s life revolves, not necessarily the hub.

One of the classes I’m teaching at CCM requires me to study up on the history and practice of public relations.

I’m not exactly a stranger to the profession. I worked for a major media company that has always employed publicists. I’ve written press releases. I count publicists and PR folks among my friends, right? Etc.

But the more I study public relations, the more it feels like propaganda.

And the more I study it, the more it feels like social media is an arm of public relations.

I know social media is supposed to be (at heart) about conversation + connection, but haven’t I used it to build my own public image? To build the image or story that benefits my career and future?

Don’t I advise writers to do the same? To use it as a form of public relations?

On the other hand, it’s a very personal and immediate form of “public” relations.

When you have an all-worlds-collide method in your online life, as I do, then you have all kinds of relationships that mix at every moment—because I really hate to segment. I like to think everything can co-exist harmoniously, since I enjoy transparency, honesty, authenticity. (Though perhaps even that is manufactured?)

But … when it’s all-access, all-the-time, it’s not the strangers (or the public) who present the challenge.

It’s the personal connections. Their presence sticks—throughout the ups and downs of the relationship—unless we forcibly break the bond. Go cold turkey. Disappear.

Social media makes the dissolution of relationships much harder to bear than ever before.

These special people (or those who you would like to un-special, at least until you don’t care any more): They stay in your line of sight.

It’s like picking at a scab, seeing if it will hurt, again and again and again. It encourages phantom connection, and emphasizes the pain of disconnect, when you don’t have the intimate backstory behind an update written for thousands.

Every 5 or 10 years, I find a song that is unbearably perfect.

I don’t mean musically, though that’s part of it.

Rather: It is so philosophically, artistically, and personally meaningful that I comprehend an entirely new facet of life (or myself) after hearing it.

That song, now: “We Used to Wait” by Arcade Fire [which is amplified here by the interactive/online experience, "The Wilderness Downtown"]

This song comes to me at a moment when everything has changed—so much it’s impossible to fathom it on a daily basis.

So bits of it leak out, day by day. Week by week.

I listen to the song, I understand a little more. I listen again, a week later, something else is retrieved.

It sounds like I’m lost and remembering.

It IS kind of like remembering.

In high school I took great pleasure and ceremony in the writing of letters to long-distance loves. Everything was handwritten—no e-mail, no printers.

And you envisioned when the letters reached their destination. Then you anticipated the reply. The feel of the envelope, the smell, the quality of paper inside, the moment of joy at its arrival.

The lifetimes that would pass in between moments of correspondence—waiting for it!

I’ve kept the tradition of handwriting letters to people I love most dearly.

It is a different language. It is a different person conveyed (and a different person written to).

How strange to think the person who handwrites becomes a different person via e-mail, and a different person still when encountered in-person.

But they are all versions and perspectives.

What is most true? What version do we trust?

What truly lasts?

My only conclusion: Nothing.

Every day, we start again.

[Intro] Those who love Barthes are reminded, by his writing, of what true intimacy entails: supreme attunement alternating with bewildered estrangement. Instability—the instability of meaning, in particular—is his constant theme.  … In these excerpts, grief gives Barthes the permission he could never give himself: to let go.

Everyone guesses—I feel this—the degree of a bereavement’s intensity. But it’s impossible (meaningless, contradictory signs) to measure how much someone is afflicted.

—

A stupefying, though not distressing notion—that she has not been “everything” for me. If she had, I wouldn’t have written my work. Since I’ve been taking care of her, the last six months in fact, she was “everything” for me, and I’ve completely forgotten that I’d written. I was no longer anything but desperately hers. Before, she had made herself transparent so that I could write.

—

Monday, 3 p.m. — Back alone for the first time in the apartment. How am I going to manage to live here all alone? And at the same time, it’s clear there’s no other place.

—

… That’s how I can grasp my mourning. Not directly in solitude, empirically, etc.; I seem to have a kind of ease, of control that makes people think I’m suffering less than they would have imagined. But it comes over me when our love for each other is torn apart once again. The most painful point at the most abstract moment …

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Solitude = having no one at home to whom you can say, I’ll be back at a specific time, or whom you can call to say (or to whom you can just say), Voila, I’m home now.

—

To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought … ?

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Everyone is “extremely nice”—and yet I feel entirely alone. (“Abandonitis.”)

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Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

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Letter [from Proust] to George de Lauris, whose mother has just died (1907): “Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. … it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.”