Well, what is love?
What is love Antony? What is love?
This is about as good as it gets.
And it seems to get better as we get older.
But there will probably be a tipping point
where we don’t know what’s going to happen
and we’ll just have to be willing to 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.
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’re embodying now is,
‘May our home be a place where people can accept themselves.’
Which, when we drew that up, 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 are at 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 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,
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 were 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 cementing of the relationship.
Since then I’ve stopped travelling.
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 our children 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...
I wouldn’t take it anyway.
But for us, what’s 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.
Not all the time darling.
But it’s quite a deliberate, ritualised 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 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 veld (nature) and my wife.
That’s how it feels.
I’m so pleased you live in me.
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 will appear all by itself.
If I look over one day and she’s not there, it will 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 hills,
and we’ll have sirens and choirs of angels all over the place.
And then I’ll play music with the angels.
That’s how it feels to me.
And I’m not looking forward to it.
It sounds like you are... 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 at 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.
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?