Cary Tennis, Salon.com's "Since you asked..." advice columnist, has a really lovely piece today called "Can love be willed?"
If you could not will flight but had to wait for it to occur like a meteor across the sky, it would elude the calculations of aeronautical engineers and the step-by-step catechisms of how-to publishers and come to reside solely in the world of dreams and epiphany. Airline schedules would be even harder to keep than they are today.
But that is the place love occupies. It is not a mineral to be mined or a physical process to be flowcharted and then refined for yearly productivity increases. It is a sudden unexpected taking to the air, as miraculous and as unfathomable.
On the other hand, that doesn't mean that you can have no human relationships of enduring power and depth. It doesn't mean you can't love. In fact, if you look down, you may find that you are flying right now, just not as high off the ground as you expected.
There's lots I could say about varying altitudes in my own relationships. But right now I'm avoiding a lot of work here in my office, so I'm off to focus on that.
