Let go

leaps

Hello, it’s August and I’ve been missing you most.

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I found myself in the gardens of Versailles with my best friend. We meandered through hedgerows, down dusty paths in search of lost time or something to marvel at, as if we were in a deficit of beauty. Tourists loitered as far as the eye could see. Classical music boomed from within deep bocages. I’d been to the castle more than a decade ago. Flashes of deja vu coagulated with my exhaustion from having not yet adjusted to being seven hours into the future. 

We encountered several small ravines splicing the road. Taking stock of their depth and width, we wondered if we could—with a good running start—leap across to the other side. My friend was more convinced in her own strength than I was. She’s several inches taller than me, but it’s her will that makes me sure she could do it. I imagined my own jump and inevitable plummet to the rocky bottom. Broken leg, bruised from elbow to thigh, covered in mud. A crash that would feel more like a crisis of faith.

We stopped speculating and landed somewhere softer. In the grass, half-asleep and jet-lagged, I attempted to map Søren Kierkegaard’s leap of faith to relationships, not religion. The leap of faith is a common enough idiom that it has almost been rendered meaningless. Kierkegaard first introduced the theory through the parable of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac/Ishmael. Abraham wholly invests in the call from God to sacrifice his only son in order to prove his total piety to his creator. It’s a call not dissimilar from the uncannily similar one God himself has to make to grant humanity salvation.

But it’s not exactly a leap of faith, rather a leap by faith. A leap of would mean that you have had to suspend disbelief, and launch yourself into the unknown. A leap by faith requires that you have invested yourself in someone or something before you jump at all. Faith isn’t a guarantee. Faith, for Kierkegaard, is in itself absurd; there is no proof of logic, no reason, no concrete evidence. To take the leap, you must accept that there is no guarantee, but also believe in the possibility of the guarantee. The hope is the suspension. A chimera, which I recently learned, also means a hope that is illusory. Belief is the free fall. I think of Anne Carson: To be running breathlessly, but not yet have arrived is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

“What if you lived as if you have already taken the leap?” my friend asked as I threaded two pieces of grass together.

We were, unsurprisingly, talking about relationships. To live as if you have already taken the leap would require absolute faith in not only the other person, but, in my rudimentary understanding of Kierkegaard, something far more absurd: eternity. The promise that isn’t a promise has been made, but there’s no proof it’s been kept until it is kept. A continuous conditional. 

My friend’s question unknowingly echoed Kierkegaard: But to be able to fall down in such a way that the same second it looks as if one were standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a walk, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian [...] and this is the one and only prodigy. 

To walk the walk of faith, to be suspended in belief rather than disbelief. I’m doing that. It’s not a matter of fooling myself into believing. I just have come to believe. To love someone is always to take a leap into the unknown. At least to love someone the right way—with full abandon. If you’re asking yourself if you should take the leap, whether or not you’re in love, Carson comes to mind again: it’s always already too late, dēute, as the poets say. 

I’ve been preoccupied with the leap, having taken one almost a year ago, because recently, several friends have fallen in love faster than they ever have before. I talked with one friend on the phone for a while. We wonder how it can happen so fast, if the speed determines how real it is. I commiserated with them because I asked myself the same questions. I recounted the story of how fast I fell between blushes and nervous laughter, as if I’m standing in front of a whole host of people ready to judge me for being crazy. It’s just my friend listening to my confession. A friend who knew I was the person to call and tell them it wasn’t all in their head.

Over the phone, I wondered if the faith that is required for falling in love fast comes from all the lessons learned from past relationships that didn’t work out. Kierkegaard writes, “Leap of faith, yes, but only after reflection.” My newly in-love friends try to remember what it felt like in the past. What was it like to fall in love before this? Is there a sanity check I can perform to know that this time, it will last?

In some ways, this theory contradicts Kierkegaard’s claim that faith mandates an absence of empirical proof. But if these relationships had been proof back then, we would have taken the full leap. We waited at the precipice for some deus ex machina to push us over the edge, all while our feet were firmly planted on the ground. Make the choice for me. The leap is a running jump of wild abandon. Leap then, into the arms of God. The believer must take the leap themselves, not on behalf of another; for God’s love is not a secondhand gift.

There are so many social expectations around love, especially when you’re in the early stages of dating someone. Arbitrary milestones that you must wait a certain amount of time before you can achieve. Ok, three months have gone by, I guess we can be exclusive now. Is six months long enough to tell them I love them? When is the right time for them to meet my family? Should they hang out with my friends? We obsess over dating taboos as an attempt to prevent certain outcomes—the worst of which would be losing the relationship. We scare ourselves away from the edge, retreating to a safer vantage point where we convince ourselves we could take stock of things more rationally.

Knowing it is love when it seems impossible is a radical commitment to faith and a rejection of logic. Love is ineffable, and some might say absurd. When I say “I love you” to someone it’s a paltry phrase meant to capture all the indescribable feelings I have toward that person and experiences I’ve shared with them. It’s a phrase that is meant to communicate my faith in that feeling. The highest passion man can experience, according to Kierkegaard, is faith. Faith, too, is ineffable. We can’t explain it to other people why we have given ourselves over to it completely.

So many people talk themselves out of falling in love. They put up checkpoints as some insurance against heartbreak. Hide themselves before they risk being made profane, before they can make a fool of themselves because love makes us all look a little crazy.

I have this hunch that certain aspects of romance are predetermined anyway. Whether you want to fight it or not isn’t a choice you have. My boyfriend has one theory: when you’re newly texting a crush, it’s predetermined if they will text you back or not. It doesn’t really matter what you or the other person say. This is meant to give lovesick friends license to worry less about calculating every message and more freedom to be themselves. I tend to agree. Whether he would see it this way or not, this predetermination encourages an early leap of faith. 

My friend and I talk about the improbability of certain connections. Sometimes I get starry-eyed and wonder if falling in love is by some great design. But isn’t luck more miraculous than fate? Out of all the possible people you could have met, you found them by faith alone. Together, you lived for the questions rather than the answers. You went further and further. You were the exceptions, special in your shared belief that this will last. I do not remain standing for no reason, my whole life is in this. 

We never attempt to jump over the ravines. It’s not actually a crisis of faith that we don’t try. It’s only a risk of gravity I’m not willing to take in a strange land. Who knows if my insurance would cover a fall? We’re joking, mostly. We have plenty of time. You probably know that I’d follow you down anywhere if you took my hand. Standing with you over the precipice, eternity starts to look like a few languid hours on a sunny afternoon in the park. I’m with you for a reason. Take my hand. We can run further, diving headfirst into crashing waves, where we’ll teach ourselves to breathe in this brand new world.  

A Summer’s Tale, dir. Eric Rohmer (1996)