A Traveler's Diary: Choosing to Love

I am the peer assistant for a freshman seminar taught by my favorite professor.  

So far I have enjoyed getting to know and assisting the girls in my class.  

The professor, Mary Beth and I met up yesterday to chat about an activity we’d be demonstrating for our girls.  

Based on their assigned reader, Matched, we each brought an “artifact” to show to the class--the sole item we would keep from our heritage if we were living in the dystopian society of the novel.  Mary Beth brought a gorgeous crazy quilt that belonged to her great grandmother, and I brought my dad’s traveler’s diary, barely twenty years old.  

I selected the diary because within its contents are my father’s feelings and inner dialogue as he is courting my mother.  

Within this special book are my origins.  

The reason I love it so much is, as I have always said, that my parents are the ones who taught me how to love.  

How to choose to love.  

Within the pages I see my father’s choice not only to love my mother, though time, geographic distance, class, religion and a variety of other factors separated them, but his choice to love me, too.  

They have taught me to be a friend, they have taught me how to love Cam.  

I have found in life that love often begins with a flutter...like the uncontrollable flail of an infant’s arm...but once we have caught hold of that feeling we may begin to exercise it...to flex it and train it and make our love a strong, robust and usable thing, far less fragile than the random flailing of a newborn. 

We choose to love, and the choice makes our love grow stronger.