What is love?

Well, what is love? What is love? This is about as good as it gets. And it seems to get better as we get older, but there'll probably be a tipping point where we don't know what's going to happen and we'll just have to be willing to kind of slide together down some slippery slope. When we got married, we worked out a series of vows which we wrote out and we said to each other, I can't really remember what they were, except that it was something like that we hope one day we will sit here in our old age still together and just enjoy this life that we've been given, you know. Maybe we do need to renew our vows so that we remember what we said, but the one that stands out quite strongly which I feel we embodying now is may our home be a place where people can accept themselves. When we drew that up, it was a beautiful intention and I feel like we're really living that. The other was that we don't hide behind each other, that we have our own identity and our own one with ourselves, that we're not hiding behind another person or expecting them to fulfil what is important to us. What is often hard to accept when you live so much inside yourself is that the person in front of you is very different to you. I think in a marriage that's the hardest thing, to realise that some of the differences that you fell in love with in the beginning are the things that bug you later. I've seen that in myself and with others. So it's really those are the little daily things that need to be communicated and sat down and made a compromise. I see that if I leave the butter out after I make toast that my wife is furious daily, then I think the one way I can show a commitment to the relationship is to either not have toast at all or to have toast without butter or to put the butter away. And I don't have to talk to her about it. I don't have to be analytical about it. I just, you know, one picks it up. And of course there are things I do that will infuriate her that I don't pick up. She'll tell me. She's not scared of me in that way. If I look back, there are stages in a married life. There's the initial excitement of being together and then of course the utter astonishment of having children. That was just wonderful beyond measure. Sometimes it was really hard work. We had to earn a living. I had to travel to work. There was times we had to be apart, times we came together. And we didn't resist it or complain. We just did it. And in retrospect, that doing of it was a wonderful kind of cementing of the relationship. Since then, I've stopped traveling. We spend all our time together now, pretty much. We sleep together. We eat together. We drink together. And it's wonderful. And there's a whole new adjustment that happens. And I think that's really precious. People talk about, it's difficult when your children leave home. Of course they have left home long ago. But for us it's been wonderful. We've had time on our own and we make as much use of it as we can. I think it's very important to find something when your children leave home that the two of you do together that is meaningful and nourishing to both of you. When I look around at my family and my friends, that's often when couples go different ways. Then one feels that you're living two separate lives. And it's very difficult to find a place of connection because your priorities have been work, or children, or both. And now none of those are something that you share anymore. I never give advice because it's always going to be, I wouldn't take it anyway. But for us what really helped was having, as Margie says, not only a common direction in our life, but a sense that we actually deliberately do things together that are meaningful to us. Every night we gather around sunset and we watch the sun go down. In a sense ritual in that way was always a part of our life. So we always have watched the sun go down. It was always important for us. And when the children were younger they would join us and now that they're not here we sit together and we talk about them all the time. It's quite a deliberate, ritualized part of the day. So we make it precious. I think that's what we try and do. And it does become precious. Not so much because we, as it were, set out to make something precious, but we decided how we wanted to spend that time together and it turned out to be precious, which is wonderful. I feel quite strongly growing older that however much I look back to a more romantic postcard version of what life could be, that something fantastically, wonderfully ordinary has taken its place. Ordinary is extraordinary. If you think of your life, it's the little things, the ordinary little things that are very meaningful and you don't forget them. Little kindnesses, little actions that you don't expect to happen are the ordinary. And I think one of the most ordinary things that we humans are made to do is to be present and listen to each other. And I think it's only when we stop that we see the extraordinary in the ordinary. When we really stop and feel and hear. In the same way that the leaves change in spring and fall in autumn and that certain birds appear at certain times of the year and the sun comes and the wind goes, all of that is part of my life and she is absolutely, intimately as much a part of it as all of that. I live in the felt and my wife. That's how it feels. I'm so pleased you feel that way. I'd like to think that she feels something of the same. There's a sense of almost the inevitability of looking around and finding you here next to me in the same way that I lift the blind in the morning and see the sun come up. That has been a discovery for me that I did not anticipate and I wish it for everybody. And I think if one gives oneself a chance, it'll appear all by itself. If I look over one day and she's not there, it'll be heartbreaking. That's absolutely true. I will then, as best I can, honour the life that we've had together. She is my life and my life will continue. Saying she is my life doesn't mean that I have no life without her. Saying she is my life means that when she's with me, it's full of her. It means that when she dies and I'm still around, that my life will consist of whatever there is around me and that almost my duty to her would be to live that life as best as I can. As she mentioned, we undertook not to hide behind each other that I only live through you. I live through you, but that's just the beginning, it's not the end. So that when you die, I'll weep, I'll build you a fantastic grave overlooking the copies and we'll have sirens and choirs of angels all over the place. And then I'll play music with the angels, you know. That's how it feels to me and I'm not looking forward to it. That sounds like the choir of angels. Shall I bring them on now? I think the way I would honour her would be to get on with the life that is left for me. That's what she would wish for me more than anything. She would want me to see the sun come up, to dig in the garden, to look after visitors, to make the bed properly last. But I think that she would trust me that however sad it was, that sadness would become my life and would be manure for whatever last days are left, which are probably not going to be very many, you know. But that would be a huge event for me. I've got a little poem that I'd like to recite, if I may. I'll try and remember it. I shaved my head for the children of Palestine. I swept up the leaves in the Jewish cemetery. My wife wrapped presents for the old ladies in the frail care home. My daughter washed the dishes after lunch. The Buddha of compassion has 84,000 hands. Which of those are yours? Thank you so much for watching the story all the way to the end. And a special thank you to all of you on Patreon who help us to make these films. If you want to join us on the journey, please click the link over here, I think. It just wouldn't be possible without you. Thank you.