Hacker News Books

I sympathize with this a lot.

"A Severe Mercy" by Sheldon Vanauken is one of my favorite books, if not my favorite. A significant theme of that work is "moments made eternity," where eternity is used to connote both a sense of timelessness and of heaven. The author finds that his (and his wife's) most joyous times were precisely those moments where they lost track of time and simply enjoyed something (e.g., gazing at the night sky stretching out above the ocean) as long as they cared to. When they were done, they couldn't tell if minutes or hours had passed, but it didn't matter. In fact, that was part of the joy of the moment. Ultimately, they find themselves longing for the Christian ideal of heaven, where eternity will be all they have and they'll no longer be constrained by time.

I too find that I enjoy such moments of timelessness... one in particular sticks out in my head. I had hiked with my 2-year-old son down to a creek in a local state park. I sat in the grass and watched while he threw pine cones and sticks into the water, splashed around, and just had a blast doing what boys do. When I checked the time, I realized that we had been there for nearly 3 hours, though I could have sworn it was only a few minutes.

I find clocks as useful as anybody else, but I also find escaping them for a bit to be a delight...

Probably the two most important things as I close my first year of marriage (2 January is my anniversary):

- Do as much as possible together. Try to play games on the same team. Eat meals together. Talk together. Get ready in the mornings together. Watch movies together. Do as much as you possibly can - together. If you think about the way we use the word 'marry' in other concepts (i.e. the perfect marriage of X and Y), it talks about a blending of two things that becomes a new, third thing. So, marriage isn't just two people living in the same place. It's two people becoming something new together. One of the best examples I've seen of this idea is the second chapter of the book A Severe Mercy. The togetherness the author writes about is ridiculously complete.

- The wedding, as much work as it takes to put together, is just the starting line. Don't make the mistake of thinking that you've won your wife and can move onto another project. It's an incredibly easy mistake to make, and a terribly dangerous one. Marriage, especially because of my first point, is hard work. It's breath-taking and awe-inspiring, but it's also hard work. I Love it!

Congratulations!