When I was preparing to officiate my first wedding, I was stumped on what to talk about. I wanted to share an experience rather than preach or lecture.
The idea came to me in the middle of a hot yoga session, which meant I had to hold on to it for sixty minutes while sweating and unable to write anything down. I repeated it to myself until class ended.
I went straight to my car afterward and wrote down two words: one second. Most of what I wanted to say that day came out right there in the parking lot.
Months later I was standing in front of the couple, and I was nervous. I have not been nervous speaking in front of a room in decades. It happened because this mattered and because they mattered.
I told them it was a blessing to officiate, that I was getting to unite two people I cared about. I also had a captive audience, which was a gift of a different kind.
Then I shared something my three children taught me: how to spell love.
T-I-M-E.
What the Children Actually Taught Me
Children make that definition clear because they are not persuaded by intent. My reasons for being late did not register. My explanation of why the call had to be taken did not register. What registered was whether I was there.
I took that to heart in two ways, and both of them are small enough that no one outside our family would have noticed.
I did not drop my kids off at school. I parked the car and walked them to the door. It cost a few extra minutes each morning, and it meant the day started with something they could see rather than something I intended.
At night, I tucked them in. Almost never missed it.
Neither of those is a grand gesture. That is the point. They are the same second, spent again, several thousand times.
Standing in front of that couple, I wanted to talk about something smaller than years together. Smaller than vacations, anniversaries, or even an evening at home.
One second.
The Choices Nobody Witnesses
We describe our lives in large units. Years married. Decades building a company. The ages of our children. How long it has been since everything changed.
Those measurements tell us how much time has passed. They tell us almost nothing about what we did with it.
Some of the choices inside them announce themselves. You sign your name. You say yes. You make a promise in front of the people who matter most.
Most do not.
I have had the perfect comeback ready. It would have landed. It might have won the argument. Once or twice I have managed to swallow it, not because I am disciplined but because I could see, in that half breath before speaking, exactly what it was going to cost the person in front of me.
I have put the phone down while someone I love was talking. I have also failed to, more times than I want to count, and told myself the difference was small.
At a wedding we witness a commitment. There is a recognizable moment when two people become married. Then comes an ordinary Tuesday, when someone is tired, something needs doing, and both people have good reason to believe they have already done more than their share.
That is where the promise has somewhere to go. Into a question asked with curiosity instead of an accusation. A task handled without keeping score. An honest admission that there is nothing left tonight and help is needed.
I think this is why we cherish couples who have been together for decades. We recognize, without knowing a single detail, how many of those moments the relationship has contained, and how often they had to find their way back to each other.
A long marriage holds thousands of choices no wedding guest will ever see.
The Second I Begin
MS has made this concrete in my daily life.
I decide to work out. There is a second in there when the deciding stops and the beginning starts, when I stop negotiating with myself about whether I feel like it.
The workout takes two and a half hours. The effort is real. But those hours are only available because of that one second, and the second has to be spent again tomorrow.
I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this that turns into a lie people tell the chronically ill. No amount of exercise gives me a guarantee. The progression of a disease is not a scoreboard for how hard someone fought, and I have watched people fight harder than me and lose more. Some days doing what I can means respecting a limit or recovering so that I can come back.
But we all have choices inside the uncertainty. That is the boy asking the girl out, deciding in one second that the risk of hearing no is smaller than the risk of never asking. That is two people promising each other a life with no way of knowing what the life will contain.
Mine happen to involve a diagnosis. I can decide how I care for the body I have today, with some hope of preserving what it can do tomorrow.
On the days when the effort is hard but possible, I think about my family. I want to be in the room for things none of us can picture yet. The thought of arriving at one of those moments and knowing I had not done everything I reasonably could to be there is unbearable to me. That weighs more than the hours in front of me.
So my family is inside that second. Every time.
T-I-M-E. I am working for more of it with them.
The Next One
I closed the ceremony by wishing them years full of beautiful one-second moments, and beauty in doing life together, including the parts that are hard, surrounded by people who love them.
That wish reaches well past marriage.
We will have seconds we would take back. Words said carelessly. Chances to show up that we let pass. Moments when being right mattered more to us than being kind. Those have consequences, and choosing better afterward does not erase them. It only lets us turn toward the person we hurt and start the repair.
Avery, Gabriel, Owen: you three gave me the spelling. I am still learning to live it, and you will watch me get it wrong. Watch what I do in the second after that.