Simplicity is the best remedy that life knows

April 21, 2022. No. 221

It is you who watches over my dreams, who keeps them away from the darkness that threatens these days of the world. The lamp of your spirit gives warmth to my room and sweetens the melancholy that assaults my window on a rainy afternoon. I imagine the almost imperceptible movement of your lips in this moment of reading, and I feel the privilege of your intimacy: of being the closest human to your eyes, which commits me to the maximum purity that I am capable of, to the atrocious sincerity, to the greatest detachment because you deserve to be given what I can't reach. I try —collecting treasures of art— that your life pours out towards others with more love: that would be your happiness. Mine is in feeling that I touch the next morning, whenever you whisper, with a taste of friendship.

Kipling wrote that when a man marries, he either swims or drowns —and it is not convenient for him to drown. This suggests a splash in life to stay afloat, that is, learn to sustain the relationship: to endure and be supported. From this point of view, I could tell you: Get married and you'll see. But we already know that it is the lovers —and not the marriage— that cause heartbreak. It is true that there are not a few couples who do very well until they get married; this suggests a philosophical error around the concept of marriage.

An American proverb says: if you want honey, don't kick the hive. I think that in the way of assuming the own wedding is or is not the kick to love. At the moment of signing the contract, at that precise moment in which the judge or priest declares the couple united for life, a joker always appears who makes the hackneyed joke of yelling at the chosen one: You are already on board, buddy. There is a strong tendency to associate married with convicted. All this is related to ancestral prejudices, distortions of love, and formal commitment that have accompanied us since ancient societies. Oddly enough, the human mind sometimes carries remnants of slavery, feudalism, and, of course, capitalism. Reminiscences of those marriages arranged in the courts in pursuit of noble titles, or as a bourgeois business to increase fortunes, have survived to this day. Well, in fact, there is still flesh and blood royalty in the world. Hence, the past and its schemes have not remained in the previous centuries, sometimes we carry their ashes inside and there are even those who revive them as a Phoenix.

Getting married once is an obligation; twice, nonsense; and three times, a madness says a Dutch proverb, although it does not have to refer exactly to the act of the wedding, it does imply the marriage is a burden.

Getting married is not tying yourself to another person but rather freeing yourself from them.

Simplicity is the best remedy that life knows. The sensationalism carries an implicit emptiness, a masquerade, a theatrical spirit that hides the authentic. Love does not need to show itself: its light is so long that it illuminates the days by itself.