The Romeo & Juliet Express

Getting on Board

Relationships. We all got em, the late Jimmy Buffett bemoaned in his song, Fruitcakes. We all want em. What do we do with em?

It’s a fair question. A riddle that seems never to have just one solution (for his part, Buffett suggests the answer lies in having more fruitcakes in the world and less bakers, which is fine. Having business and culinary connections to that world, I can see why he might say that. One could say the same thing about writers, teachers, parents and grown ups, in general).

Further, the struggle is not isolated to only those out there dating, searching for or already in a rapport of togetherness, but to anyone in need of companionship or lost in relentless mindfuck of its alternative, loneliness. Songs are written about the struggle. Poets lament. We go to the movies to assuage our inner selves of the worry that we are the only ones suffering from the self-deprecating, market reinforced misery rooted in concern that the problem lies, somehow, solely within ourselves. As in: What’s wrong with me? 

The answer, of course, is nothing. Nothing is wrong with you. If you’ve been told there is, you’ve been lied to. 

That’s not to say anyone is perfect. We are all flawed in one way or another, and the problem here, if there is one, may rest with the outcomes, or rather our wish to control the outcomes. In other words, in order to act—or react— we want to know how things will play out before actually letting them, ahem, play out. I’m that way in a lot of situations. Living in the future. Setting high expectations. Overreacting and then projecting my disappointment if and when those expectations don’t fit reality. (Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, is Buffett’s reaction to that.)

The problem, I think, here is one of commitment and its bedfellow doubt. A struggle rooted in the unknown and vulnerability. 

For certain there is not just one right answer, not a definitive one anyway. Opportunities arise. To some we say yes, to others no. To some we just ride along, until we know better, until we feel differently, until another path opens. What matters, in the words of existential psychologist Rollo May, is that commitment is healthiest “when it’s not without doubt, but in spite of doubt”.  

Let’s hear that again. Commitment is healthiest when it’s not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.

Accept not knowing. 

This is the case, in the film, The Polar Express, when the conductor candidly points out the following (he is speaking of trains, of course, which metaphorically means life): “What matters is not where the train is going. What matters is the decision to get on board”.

Think of your own life when you did something in spite of doubt. Instead of listening to whatever voice inside your head was screaming, Stop. Wait. That’s stupid. Don’t do it. Play it safe—you simply agreed to get on board. You took the leap. Dove in. Made a go for it. Seized the moment.  

It sounds easier than it is, I know. As I’ve mentioned more than once in this newsletter, it is not a how-to. I don’t know what I’m doing any more than anyone else. In most cases, I know less. But I know what it means to take a chance when chance comes around.

Still, I write this not from a position of authority, but merely as someone who has been there and made the choice many years ago to just get aboard the train. Did it solve all my worries, no. Am I a mess still, you bet. But am I a better person because of that decision, Absolutely.  

Take today’s topic even, which started life (in my head, anyway) as a love letter to my best friend and wife, who celebrates a birthday today. Instead, it feels more like a treatise on …what exactly? Vulnerability? Risk? Uncertainty? 

I’m not sure I even know what I’m saying here but I do know what’s in my heart and what my heart told me a long while ago and is telling me still is that a decision I made those many years ago, 32 and counting, close to this very date in fact, was the moment in which I chose to stop living my life as if it were a high-def movie scene unfolding before my eyes and just get my ass on the train. In spite of any doubts I might have had.

If you’re a little lost in this, I understand completely. It’s hard to explain without overexplaining. It’s something that happens with feelings all the time. They are strong, and words fail them. So let me try another way. 

Franca and I have a favorite song that we listen too quite often. It was released before we were a couple, before even we had met, and serves as a fun and happy reminder of our early adulthood. It also serves as a reminder of us becoming a couple. It’s Romeo and Juliet, by Dire Straits. Which, if you give it a close listen, you’ll realize it is not—much in they way the play it is based on—a love song. Well it is—they are—but not one that ends with happily-ever-after. Quite the opposite, actually.

Our particular story turned out differently, obviously, and that’s why I think we both love it. It’s a reminder not of what was but of what may have been—a life separate from one another—had we both not made the decision to get on board that proverbial train.

It was a big decision, for sure, and there were many things pulling us in different directions. But somehow we were able to ignore them as we both felt strongly about being together. Were things broken in doing so. Yep, but we’ve all been told that the cracks, the broken places, the wounds, are where the light enters. So they say anyway. Either way, ours was a commitment made in spite of the doubts. Instead of it being the wrong time, as the song goes, to ourselves and one another, we cried, All aboard. 

Happy birthday, amore. Glad I got on this train when I did.