I’ve been writing about hard things for a long time. Suffering. Fate. The gap between knowing and doing. The mechanics of how we lose ourselves to scoreboards and inheritances we never agreed to. I think the work has been worth doing. Those are the subjects where the philosophy I draw from took itself seriously without flinching.
But I want to turn the other direction for a little while.
Because love is also part of what the philosophers were trying to protect, and somewhere along the way I think we’ve started defaulting to talking about the difficulty of life as though it were the whole picture.
It isn’t. There is also this. The feeling of someone’s hand on your back when you’re tired. The quiet of a room that contains the right person. The way you can be exhausted and stressed and impatient with everything, and then someone you love walks in and your whole body decides, without consulting you, to soften a little.
That softening is one of the most ordinary and one of the most extraordin…