Pretty soon I will celebrate 25 years of legal residence with the woman I met when we were 12 years old at a summer camp (i.e., my wife). She would like to celebrate by going on an exotic holiday trip with me or demonstrating some other method of recognising that we've enjoyed good days and bad days together for about 9,125 days.
Twenty-five years. What can happen in that many revolutions of Earth around our most important star?
People have died but many more people were born in that time period. Could we say that birth has had a greater effect on our species' existence than death? Perhaps. More likely, we'll point to historical records that detail the warring nature of primates like us, rather than the ordinary joys and discoveries of new children in our lives.
If we look at ourselves as a species in toto, we can address population growth from a view of life without border constraints (because border disputes are a great source of excuses for starting wars ("the grass is always greener on the other side")).
[I pause here to consider the "natural" behaviour of our species long ago (pretending to erase 1,000,000+ years of civilisation development), when we were more a reactive species than a proactive one, then mentally follow our progress as we learned to hitch a ride onto the resources we harnessed around us and innocently took control of the local environment, and finally look at us 100,000 years from now when we'll be nothing like we are now. Will words like capitalism, communism, socialism, democracy, oligarchy, monarchy, dictatorship and totalitarianism be remembered? Absolutely not.]
What if you could look at most future scenarios and chart courses today that lead you toward any or all of them?
The cry of the wren outside your window would have as much of an effect on the future as anything else.
Twenty-five years of staying loyal to the concept of matrimony. Some would call it sexually monotonous or morally uninteresting (as in the quote, “The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.”).
Of course, marriage is a relatively recent addition to our growing millennial-long list of acts of civility.
Essentially, marriage was one way to [try to] guarantee that two people will, barring major illness or unexpected death, raise their offspring together without forcing their children's complete care onto the already-full lives of others.
Is monogamy an inherent genetic trait? I don't know. In any case, our thoughts - the superset of ideas we pass from one generation to the next - have superseded the trait, if it exists/existed.
I have faced physical sexual temptations in my married life and resisted all of them. Does that make me any more or less interesting to others? I don't know.
Marriage is the only commitment I've ever made that I intended to stick with. Whether it was my general cultural training, Boy Scout training, religious training, and/or genetic disposition that encouraged that point of view, I don't know and it doesn't matter to me. The fact remains that my life partner and I chose each other after years of being friends.
We haven't had children together so we've shared our lives and bounty with nieces, nephews and the community at large, instead, while remaining physically/mentally faithful to one another (I admit I have made "what if" comparisons throughout my married life but have never found anyone more compatible than my wife).
I've met people who shouldn't marry and shouldn't have married. But at the same time, they have been or could have been good parents. Therefore, marriage and parenthood are not necessarily synonymous.
While watching a family of titmouse birds make their way through the forest past our house, I think about the family that is my species spread around Earth.
How do we as a species reconcile civil/religious differences in the definition of marriage and parenting? Can we?
If life is a series of coincidences, accidents and other intersections of space and time that from at least one perspective a person could label a "black swan"...
If up to 40% of births are tied to extramarital encounters...
Will a "Brave New World" or "Matrix" future of society-in-general raising our children from birth redefine the civil union between two people?
Or will we, as an expanding population of ever-more-diverse specialised subcultures, always have conflicting views that provide individuals the right to choose which one works best for them in the subcultures they wish to live?
You see, I have considered this issue here before, so I wonder, if this is my planet, why others who might have read my words or been unknowingly influenced by them, would question the location of a religious center in which people who also fear extremism as much as others (after all, the 9/11 attack hijacked their religion from them) promote civil unions similar to my view.
At last, I find myself at the bottom of this blog entry knowing none of this really matters. Whether the Ottoman Empire, the Mayan Empire, the British Empire, the Russian Empire or the Mongol Empire reappears in a new form (eventually showing once again that there's no such thing as "too big to fail"), we're still one species of individuals figuring out how to make our way through life relatively free of oppression in order to live as children and/or parents, married or otherwise. Ultimately, these are just a few paragraphs of procrastination while I momentarily put aside thoughts of how/where to get the money to finance a fancy 25th wedding anniversary celebration with my wonderful wife.
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