Salt of the Earth

Four years ago i sat in a Catholic church watching my cousin marry his wife. Prior to the wedding I hadn’t been in a church for a very long time due to my skepticism about religion and what not. I was in a transitional place then. Questioning many areas of my life. As I sat and listened to the priest go on and on about marriage, love, and religion it all sounded monotonous until he talked about commitment. He said that you don’t marry for love you marry for commitment because eventually love fades and commitment is what you have left. At first I thought that was the worst thing someone could say to a young couple embarking on this ‘life time’ journey together. It made no sense to me and the romantic inside of me fought this idea and belief that in the end, all marriage is about is a matter of will. Since then many people I know have divorced. I watched many of them fall in love, marry, have children and then fall apart. Some of them were very unpredictable and some were just so obvious. In many, one person just got tired of being treated a certain way and left for something ‘better’. Many tried their hardest to mend the relationship but in the end they just couldn’t forgive or change the other person enough to like them again. When you are young you are optimistic and have hope that in the end there is a sunset to walk off into hand in hand. I think as you get older you mature and you realize that this is just something we were told at bed time in the form of a fairy tale to make us go to sleep faster. I don’t want to say that i DON’T believe in this proverbial ’sunset’. I think it’s way more complicated than that. Since the dissolving of these marriage and experiences I’ve contemplated many times why it is that some people do bad things to the people they are supposed to love, cherish, etc… for better or for worse, til death do you part. What makes these people think it’s ok to hurt people, to not care that they are hurting people and then to act surprised when the people they hurt get hurt? Commitment? Because they signed a paper in front of God and family and friends and possibly a lot of people they don’t even talk to anymore? I’m reminded of that old Pavlov’s theory of “conditional reflexes” (— i.e., reflex responses, like salivation, that only occurred conditionally upon specific previous experiences of the animal.) You know- the whole ring a bell, dog salivates because he associates that with being fed. I think the same can be said in the negative- you kick a dog away from the table long enough and hard and even the most loyal dog will stop coming around. Maybe it’s human nature for people to hurt each other. i don’t know….. When do you draw that line between commitment and standing up for your self? When does commitment give someone else the license to belittle, judge, unfairly compare? None of this was covered at the wedding so i don’t really have the answer. All I know is that as humans we all have a breaking point. I have seen several people ‘break’. The thing that has shocked me the most though is that when the one person reaches their breaking point-more times than not the person who was doing the breaking is shocked. Shocked that the person is gone. Shocked that the person had enough. Shocked that their actions produced such a consequence as someone leaving them as a result of of their bad behavior. So where am I going with all of this? That’s a good questions. Just be nice. Cherish what you have. Appreciate what you have every single day.

T