Spending a lot of time with her and the boy without the expectation of leaving soon is a new way of life, and I love it. The last six months of life NOT traveling around have been a dream come true. Unfortunately, given the nature of my professional career, consistent home living is not a reality I could have expected even ten years ago, and now that life (at least in Alaska) seems to be in the process of returning to what we consider “normal”, I am perhaps in the minority of people who don’t care at all about going back. Our slowdown in the last half-year has given me the opportunity to declutter my brain and focus on living with her.

My feelings of love may be unbounded, but my capacity to be loving is limited. I therefore must choose the person on whom to focus my capacity to love, toward whom to direct my will to love. True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision.

At the beginning of it all, I only knew how much I wanted to spend time with her. Love was not even a word in my vocabulary because back then I didn’t truly know what it means. But now I realize the growth we experience, through our conversations and constant togetherness, are the stuff of real human existence — it is the basic value of being alive.

She is life.

I’m sure that if for some reason we were apart I would find a way to survive — but with her I don’t even care about things beyond sustaining our life together and helping it grow. Living near her for the last six months shows me how much everything I do is driven by the will to propagate this life of ours, so why would I care about the selfishness of wanting more time alone?

Extension of ourselves or moving out against the inertia of laziness we call work. Moving out in the face of fear we call courage. Love, then, is a form of work or a form of courage. Specifically, it is work or courage directed toward the nurture of our own or another’s spiritual growth.