Branded Blog

A few years back – before moving to Cape Town, before getting married, before setting aside my high heel shoe collection – the barefoot man and I had two little red notebooks that we kept to write to each other in when we were apart. When we met up again, we’d swop them and read what had been written to us in our absence.

One of those wondrous missives was about something he called “glow”.  He described it like this:  “Glow. All people attach emotional content to their environment and are largely unconscious of this content. Psychotherapists call it projection. I’ve heard it called GLOW. I like that term more.”

The idea and the word came drifting back to me not long ago when I realised, surprisingly, that our wedding has started to take on a glow for me now, two years and two months+ later.

It’s taken a while and to be honest I hadn’t thought about it in a long time but after our second anniversary in January I realised that I was now looking back at the day and starting to see it in it’s beautiful beach light, and not in terms of the glaring things that were – at least according to me – not quite perfect!

If I think about it now I hear voices and laughter.

I see the beach and the perfect windless day we miraculously had in mid January.

I watch people smiling at us, being present for us.

I recall  having only really special, carefully chosen words to say.

I remember the thread in my zip that lead to a dress malfunction just before the ceremony more for the fact  that my wonderful flower-fairy friend fixed it in two seconds than for the fact that I almost let it overwhelm this important moment in my life!

I remember Phoebe-dog with our rings, and sitting on my dress long into the night.

I remember sitting on the dunes barefoot with my husband and laughing at how anti-social we both are!

I recall the small details of fynbos confetti, our rings on the ribbon and proteas in silver. And later-night philosophy discussion on the roof deck, fortified with wine.

And I remember jumping to the count-down and all the hand-written cards that now adorn our broom.

It has become more special in the remembering, for me, than it was then. It has taken on a glow.

And I realise now, as I look back at all the photos of the day, that I understand why people say it was the “best day of their lives” but that I can’t bring myself to say the same. How can you look back and view something past as the high point of your life? What is there left to look forward to if you do?

I love that day, in retrospect, in the cameras lovely eye. But it was just a day, and there are thousands more and perhaps that is why the single most important decision the barefoot man and I made that day was NOT to commit for a lifetime.

Not because we don’t foresee growing old together, and not because we want to step outside our marriage and not because we don’t feel committed to each other. We certainly do. But  for the simple reason that “ ’til death do us part” is almost incomprehensible to our little human brains. It is so hard to imagine your whole life in one sentence that it becomes an almost meaningless thing to say. It’s a throw-away line, and we strangle ourselves in it.

No, we jumped our broom on our wedding day with the full original Celtic intention of committing for “a year and a day”, and then – on that extra day – sitting down together again and re-making that commitment to each other. A year and a day I can conceive of, you see, and even then so much can change in one year. So much can change in one Tuesday afternoon.

And that’s the beauty of the broom, and of recognising the glow that attaches to days we remember and the people we were then – if we’re really present to each other and to every day that comes our way together, every day will be good. And everyday will gather it’s own little bit of glow along the way, making for a lifetime full of glowing years, one day at a time.

There’s nothing wrong with glow. It makes our lives magical as we remember them. But don’t leave it in the past, keep building the glow into every day you get – then you will always have wonderful days to remember, whatever they bring your way.

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Photos by our favourite photo-guy, the fun German, Jurgen Banda-Hansmann!

www.jurgensphotography.com