The Day After Valentine's Day

--Yesterday my Facebook feed was awash with pictures of friends celebrating Valentine's Day: relaxed people at restaurants, flowers, chocolates, and other treats. What a nice change from what often trickles across my Facebook feed: distress and anger over politics.

--I loved the memes that gave a theologian or a person from history along with a Valentine's wish crafted out of their words.  I could have fun with that for days and days.  I did notice a lack of women in the things that people posted.

--We had a fairly quiet Valentine's Day.  I am not about to go out to eat on one of the busiest nights in the restaurant industry.  We had fun cooking together.  We had some coconut milk left and some limes that were about to go bad, so we made a peanut sauce to go with pasta, sweet potato chunks, and very small scallops.  It was delicious, but it's not the kind of dish I'll long for when I don't have leftovers in the fridge.

--We relaxed as the sunset settled into dusk and then twilight.  We talked about the best approach to going to the Daytona bike week.

--I am not sure we'll be able to get the motorcycle operational by then, but my spouse will need to figure that out.  It's a relief to be able to say definitively, "I have no clue how to fix this."  There's probably a lesson that I should learn from this.

--What does it say about me that I spent part of Valentine's evening reading a book about fascism?  But Madeleine Albright's book is wonderful!  Reading was one of my first loves, so getting lost in a book while my spouse was talking to his brother about motorcycle plans didn't feel too odd.

--I do realize that our approach to love would not work for everybody.

--We ended our Valentine's evening by talking about courage and long term relationships.  In some ways, it takes more courage to stay in a long term relationship than it does to leave--at least, that was my theory last night.  When we're young, it's easy to convince ourselves that the best is yet to come, that brighter futures wait for us.  As we get closer to old age, it's easy to see all sorts of disasters that may await us.  My approach is to flee.  I want to move to a new place, which is my go-to response when things get tough:  let's light out for the territories and rewrite our lives.  It's tougher to stay committed to a place.  I see this mindset as a symbol for what love at midlife is like for so many.

--This morning, I'm thinking about Valentine's Day and how to keep the Valentine's vibe going.  The world would be very different if we looked for ways to shower the world with love each and every day, not just on Valentine's Day.