From the moment of my classic non-proposal proposal, we took three months for ourselves to get our plans in order. To figure out
—
just between the two of us
— how we wanted to express the ceremony to which we committed ourselves.
At the end of that three months we announced to our families WE’RE GETTING MARRIED!!!!! and spent the following year making decisions and planning and preparing and negotiating.
Deciding.
Planning.
Preparing.
Negotiating.
Rinse…
And repeat.
It’s one helluva drill, I’ve gotta say. And the gravity of it becomes more intense the closer you get because the wedding date and time is, in effect, a massive deadline. Whatever you’ve gotta get done has gotta be done by that date and time. And the details, the questions, just. Never. Stop. Heck, I was filling in our pastor (our former youth pastor) on a secret I’d been keeping from Kimmer about a special surprise that was gonna happen during the ceremony. I was filling him in while we were making our way to the front of the sanctuary literally right before “showtime”.
So the thing I wanna share with you right now is what happened next. You see we were walking up either the far side aisle or a hall running along the outside of the sanctuary. We were to walk to our places from the side right up front, the pastors, my best man, and me. And the memory I have, I still have, is of stepping into the sanctuary from the side and being overcome with this tremendous sense of peace.
Peace like I’d never experienced before.
And what that was about… was that we were done. The deciding, the planning, the preparing, the negotiating, the coordinating, the logistics, all the running around…
It was all. done.
There was nothing more required of us. No more obligation. No more work (to be honest).
Just this: the two of us making good on a commitment we made a year and three months prior to that moment. This moment.
To have our ceremony.
To be married.
And watch our story unfold.
We were doing this. Here. Now. For real.
And what I felt right then… was Peace.
As I indulged that memory again, I think (for me at least) that feeling, that emotional experience of inner calm and stillness is what created a bubble. One that we can still conjure from thin air even 28 years later. You see, for us, this was the most massive thing we’d ever done. And all our family and friends were there. And there were all these expectations. And there were all these things we’d planned that were supposed to happen.
But you know what?
That inner calm and stillness is what allowed me to experience it—
As just the two of us. The whole thing.
Just the two of us.
Call it the center of a hurricane if you will because that is, in effect, what it is. An inner calm and stillness that sprang into being in the midst of the most massive thing we’d ever done together.
Calm… and stillness.
Peace.
That wouldn’t be the last time we faced something massive together and had to conjure that bubble.
But this, right here?
This was the first time.
:-)
