I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of amor fati—love of fate; love of the way things are. I was thinking recently that loving another person is the closest we can come to the relationship we have with the world itself. Ultimately, the only way you can survive loving someone is to love their sheer fact, love them from inside their own world, on their own terms. You have to practice what the word “sympathy” literally means: together (syn-) feeling (pathy). You have to feel your way through the foreign world of someone else’s being, from the inside, to such an extent that your beliefs, habits, and feelings—the material of your life—can rub right against their contradictions without any self-defense reflexes such as judging or trying to change them.

When you lay all of this out and look at it for what it is, it seems amazing that we can even think ourselves capable of such development. But somehow, mercifully, we’re programmed to plunge into the shallow end almost effortlessly, and all we have to do is learn to swim. What better practice could there be for amor fati—for not just living with the fact of the world, but loving it for exactly, precisely what it is?