A marital relationship with the right person at the right time can provide a transcendent opportunity; an opportunity that offers an alternative to the somnambulant march through a life shaped by the accidents of our birth. The accidents of birth to which I refer include all of the factors that helped to form us, and over which we had little or no intentional control.
“There is nothing in a caterpiller that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.”
– Buckminster Fuller
These might include our physical attributes, such as skin or hair color; gender; our parents and kin stretching back to the first man and woman; our gifts, such as intellect, judgment, impulse control, empathy, imagination, physical beauty, grace and strength, and personality attributes, (need for control, order, recognition, attention, intellectual stimulation); our time in history and geographic place on the planet; our social status and wealth; the culture we inherited from our parents and neighbors; our primary language and the way it shaped our thinking; the media we were exposed to; the propaganda and marketing; the illnesses we suffered; the ecological conditions during the time of our development. Clearly, the list can go on and on. And without getting into lofty discussions of free will and determinism, suffice it to say that there is much over which we have had little or no control.
There is a time, however, if we are very lucky, and if we have embraced the requisite sense of humility, that we may become aware of this existential condition and make a conscious decision to transcend it. It is at this point that we can begin to make the efforts to transform our values and reshape ourselves, and seek to become the person that we really want to be, and not the one we came to be through the accidents of our birth. What a wonderful opportunity this provides for Marital Artists partnering in a relationship: the opportunity for each to help the other transcend the “accidents” of their births and to metamorphose into all that they can be.
