Monday, October 10, 2011

"You've got to find what you love'

There's a traditional narrative that society expects love stories to follow.  There's a perception - not entirely off base, either - that the crazy things that the heroes/heroines do in romantic comedies aren't nearly as endearing behavior in real life.  We accept as conventional wisdom that the movie world, where people run after each other's departing planes and sing drunken love songs on strangers' lawns, is as far removed from our own as our solar system is from the next.

And this is true up to a point.  But it's also not true.  A friend of a friend was telling me a story the other day about a married couple that she knew.  They met once, and the girl fell deeply in love with the guy.  (Sometimes this can happen; sort of) Anyway, she moved across the country to the city that he lived in.  Then she moved into the building next door to his so that they'd continue to have opportunities to run into each other.

Obviously her intuition was right and they did get together, but if she'd accepted the conventional wisdom then it would never have come to pass (and obviously, she must have had more to recommend her than just her persistence, but who knows how much more?).  That two-hour dinner would have been the end of it.

These dramatic love stories seem especially common among military couples.  A friend recently emailed me this story about a war vet who lost his legs in Afghanistan but is now in love with a girl from home.  The interesting thing about this story is that the couple spent a total of six hours together before he left for war - they liked each other, but they weren't dating.  Throughout his deployment, though, they kept in touch.  When his platoon shifted position, she wrote to him: "I am thinking of you and hope all is well."  And still, she'd only known him for a few hours.

A similar story occurred with a co-worker of mine, who met her husband through a friend when he was on leave from the military.  They talked briefly over dinner and then began an email relationship that lasted through his year-long deployment in Iraq.  Eventually, when he returned, he confessed how much he cared for her and asked her to marry him.

The only reason all of this matters is because it illustrates how far people will go for people who - as in these cases - they don't even love yet, but they could.  It's strange that in our modern world, it's perfectly acceptable to move across the country for a great job or a brilliant opportunity, but to do so for a romantic promise is both creepy and weird.  And yet 90% of people would agree that love is the most important thing in life.

In his famous commencement speech at Stanford University, Steve Jobs famously told graduates that you have to find what you love.  But there are several parts to Jobs' speech, and each supports and highlights the other.  He talks about love and loss, but then he goes on to talk about death, and how the knowledge of your own death changes your life.  He says "Death is very likely the single best invention of Life."  It's easy to say this; but it's harder to know what he means.  I suspect that the military couples I mentioned above are living examples of the lesson Jobs was attempting to teach.

I have trouble believing that I could ever die; even though the evidence all suggests it'll happen.  But if I really did, if I lived alongside that knowledge the way country singers are always encouraging us to do in various ballads, I can't help but wonder what I'd do differently.  I suspect - and this isn't an easy confession to make - that I'd try a lot harder to find what I love.  Maybe there are some lessons we can only learn the hard way; maybe there are some lessons that we never learn if our lives aren't hard enough.

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