AS LOVERS GO

My tattoo, it says "the fact that you're alive is a miracle", it's one of my 368 favorite lines from Hamilton. So you say, you've talked about that concept a lot, you've officiated two weddings and your whole speech was about that.

This is what you said in your speech:

Life is weird.

That seems like a good place to start. 

For the entirety of human existence, people have tried to find some great meaning or solve that ultimate riddle of why we’re here.

We’ve had poets, and artists, and the literary sort, who would tell you that meaning is all around you, in the laughter of children, the smell of rain, those moments when you’re alone and can’t help but dance. And we’ve had the great thinkers, philosophers, men of science. 

Some applied practical logic to the whole endeavour, they’d say procreation, survival of the species, or merely nothing at all. 

Some stepped back and looked at the wonder of the universe, purely awestruck by our true insignificance in the whole of the universe. Here we are on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam… that pale blue dot.

The bumper sticker industry has basically survived because no one’s really figured it out.

Life is weird.

Life is this long chaotic journey that we all are gifted to be a part of. 

There is nothing as amazing to me, as the beauty of this road we travel, where there’s no reset button, your day keeps going, you could make a left turn on a random Tuesday afternoon and spend the rest of your life wondering what Wednesday would have been like if you’d gone right.

But, I’ve always felt that there was one constant in the chaos, one thing, one answer, that’s never changed. That’s never criticized, or picked apart by the cynics.

And that’s love.

There’s a reason all good stories start with a girl.

Love has moved mountains, love has toppled empires, inspired operas, convinced me to listen to Coldplay when I was 14.

Love is some heavy stuff.

Love is finding that one person, who makes you smell the rain, hear children laughing, and want to dance uncontrollably 24/7.

That one person who makes you feel like staring down the vastness of the universe from your pale blue dot and saying, who’s insignificant now?

Love is that one person who makes you realize that you don’t care about left turns or right turns, because that left turn that one Tuesday afternoon was a small step in the path that would eventually lead you to finding that one person.

Love is the one thing that makes sense in the chaos.

Love makes life a little less weird.

Life, uh, finds a way.

The physicist Jon Osterman once spoke of Thermodynamic Miracles,

“events against odds so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter…” 

To be here today with two people, whose whole lives have instilled them with every little quirk and idiosyncrasy that makes them who they are. And that somehow, in the chaos, they found each other, at the right time, the right place. And to see them here before us, so in sync, so complementary, so perfect, and so in love. 

That is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle. "For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.”

For one, because I am usually the one writing my rambles, it is nice to read someone else speak of love the way I would. For two, you say you're very familiar with Hamilton because you do a lot of karaoke, but you've never seen it and refuse to have an opinion till you see it, but you'd watch it with me, though. I smile again, because I usually have to ask whether someone would like to watch it, but you preempt it, which might be wise, considering it's something I like so much I have it tattooed on me.

I say, "tell me about your ex" and you say "she was too cool for me, timing was off, we were too similar, she loved Sonic Youth" and I smile again, because it's one thing to say that your ex is too cool for you and recognize that sometimes, despite the greatest of intentions, timing is everything, and for another thing, I've never listened to Sonic Youth and I'm super uncool, so there is next to no chance I will ever remind you of her.

she said, "you've gotta be crazy,
what do you take me for,
some kind of easy mark?"

you've got wits, you've got looks,
you've got passion but I swear
that you've got me all wrong,
all wrong, all wrong
but you've got me

I'll be true, I'll be useful
I'll be cavalier, I'll be yours, my dear
and I'll belong to you
if you just let me through

this is easy as lovers go