Getting Hitched
On Tuesday, 22nd of September 2009 at the Corsewall Lighthouse Hotel in Scotland, the unimaginable happened: I got married to a bookworm! Since this was a secular humanist ceremony, officiated by a member of the Humanist Society Scotland, we were able to fill in the ceremonial details any way we wanted. Therefore, we had written our own statements and vows. With permission of the boss, I’ve reprinted my geeky, skeptical, rational statement below the space-folding jump.
Like every other tale, our tale also begins when time and space were non-existent. From this point that we often refer to with a misnomer — for it was neither big nor was there a bang — everything surrounding us, including space and time itself, came into existence. In the first instances of the universe, only light elements formed — hydrogen and helium. Most of the building blocks of this solar system, this planet, us — all the heavy elements — were fused in the burning hearts of fading stars. By chance and the laws of nature, around one insignificant star in an arm of an insignificant galaxy, those heavier elements combined just the right way to form our insignificant planet earth, and allowed the genesis of life… the emergence of us.
But by chance, our universe could have been different. There are infinitely more ways for us not to be here, than for the two of us to stand here. A change in a single natural constant and the universe might have been expending too rapidly for our galaxy to even form. A slight change in the distribution of elements and life might never have emerged.
Likewise, our own lives are also formed by chance. If events transpired just slightly different, we might have never met. A minor shift in air or water temperature, and a hurricane wouldn’t have blown me back towards you.
It is a cascade of events that brought us together, but by our own will we remain together. By the exchange of palladium rings — an element perhaps originating in the same fading star as the elements making up our own fingers which they will adorn —, in front of our friends and relatives gathered around us, and in the thoughts of those who are unable to stand here with us, I celebrate that, against all universal odds, I am able to unite my life with yours. So we can both look up, gaze at the stars where we too originate, and I can whisper in your ear: “the same chance that formed the firmament, has blessed me with you”.