I’ve been thinking a lot about promises lately.
The most important promises are layered, sometimes invisibly. A seemingly complex promise can be filed down to a simple one. An insight. Too often, promises are processed in the reverse - as a spanning web of smaller promises implied and enforced.
XTMP began as a simple promise. Each of us made a commitment to independently add content to this blog. To regularly flex our respective creative muscles. To make things. To make this thing. Jointly. Severally. I promise to create.
Holidays are promises.
A lifestyle economy revolves around the promise that you will purchase more things in the late fall and early winter. Retail outlets and services promise to help you keep your own with ever-increasing convenience and haste. I promise to buy things.
Tradition - to be in the same place this year, last year, and next. With the same people. Eating the same food. For sparse moments, your life resembles those of the generations that came before yours, and if you’re diligent, the lives that will come after. A reliable, comforting pattern that structures the passing of a year. Little bookmarks in a collective mental calendar … didn’t that happen right around Easter?
A job - a contractual set of promises. Somewhere to be. Something to do. Money. Mo’ money, mo’ promises. For food, for shelter, and for a cascading hierarchy of needs based on the connection between your fiscal bandwidth and set of promises made to others, and to yourself.
Nations, governments, families. Promises within promises.
A relationship, any relationship, is the promise that you are valued. That whatever it is that you bring to the table, it is valuable enough to continue investing time and attention into. A prolonged exchange of good vibes. The end of a relationship is a promise dissolved, a promise broken.
The voices of promise are loud and layered. In the din of a promised world, you have to listen closely to hear each one. In the face of the rest, each is meaningless.
I promise to protect you. I promise that the world has order and reason.
I promise, I promise.
