We’re all the time both drawing nearer or drifting aside — there is no such thing as a stasis in relationships. The path of motion could change over the course of a relationship, however there is no such thing as a stasis. Regardless of our tradition’s bias for the drama of cataclysm — the violent heartbreaks, the very notion of falling in love, implying a sudden tripping alongside the trail of life — essentially the most profound of those motions of the soul are the work of gradualism, their tempo geologic, their velocity that of continents, so incremental as to be imperceptible, till someday two individuals discover themselves a sum better than its elements: infinity, or zero.

This elemental tendency involves life with nice levity and allure in Drew Beckmeyer’s picture-book Stalactite & Stalagmite: A Massive Story from a Little Cave (public library). The story is massive as a result of its theme is the biggest of emotions, but in addition as a result of tucked into the love story is the evolutionary historical past of how our rocky planet grew to become a dwelling world — one thing I particularly admire as a kindred practitioner of Trojan-horsing science into life via love.

Similar to those that have lived a protracted love turn out to be one another’s memory-keepers, Stalactite and Stalagmite go the time by recounting their shared reminiscences of bygone eras and extinct creatures: their first customer, a trilobite — one of many earliest arthropods, who advised them tales of life on the backside of the deep sea; the thirsty large floor sloth who licked them for each treasured drop and casually knowledgeable them in regards to the evolution of fur; the immense triceratops who made the entire cave tremble with the echo of his roar; the meteors that turned the sky black and lashed the Earth with acid rain in order that for a protracted whereas nothing might develop and thrive.

Stalactite bonds with the bat over having the identical vantage on the cave, and Stalagmite snuggles with the ichthyostega — one of many first walkers of the land, who tells the story of how fish grew legs.

Stalactite and Stalagmite had been there, inching nearer nonetheless collectively, once we got here onto the scene to attract our desires and myths and fears on the cave wall, to invent hearth and language and science, in order that someday tour guides might shine flashlights onto the cavernous darkness and inform youngsters how stalactites and stalagmites kind.

The formation of that “one thing new” is what Adrienne Wealthy meant when she wrote of affection as “a course of, delicate, violent, typically terrifying to each individuals concerned.” What terrifies us most is the worry that the brand new formation could be a merging so whole and irrevocable that we lose ourselves within the different, lose each final boundary of the place one ends and the opposite begins, fall prey to the self-abandonment many mistake for love.

Overhearing the tour information, Stalactite and Stalagmite mirror on their future, dealing with that elementary worry however concerning the brand new formation with the notice, honed on eons of observing change, that we by no means actually know what lies on the opposite aspect of a change — we are able to solely envision what we lose of the previous we all know, however not the longer term we stand to realize.

The important thing, in love as in evolution, is to not mistake the boundaries of the conceivable for the boundaries of the attainable.