Another Choice

Which human reality?

“Till death do us part…”

Thus are celebrated the marriage vows, the oath of fidelity between two beings who are about to join their lives.

So here we are, engaged for all of our existence as a man or as a woman, from this instant to the “last”.

The entire experience of all the days and all the years will thereafter be the occasion of verifying our loyalty, our integrity, our resilience, our faithfulness, our generosity – and our patience. There are such commitments – service of a body of work or of one’s country, weddings, the giving of birth, the promise of friendship – which help us to gauge and assess our human valor through the expression of qualities that render us worthy of the shared human space.

Willingly or grudgingly each of us is thus brought, through others, through one’s milieu, to one of these exemplary trajectories which it will be our bounded duty to emulate.

Any lapse will have to be honorably justified.

For it is a matter of the integrity of the group, of the society, of the model of humanity which acts for us all as a beacon and a measuring rod and alone allows us to raise ourselves a little above our mortality.

***

Even today, as all of these our values are shaken and merged and muddled and jumbled together and our respective traditions are brought to harm by the sheer brutality of difference and the exploitation and mining of all wants and appetites is encouraged so as to provide the largest number with “comfort” and “openness”, these very trajectories, even though they are ill-treated and somewhat damaged in the general mix-up, do still hold.

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