Janice and I are flying out tomorrow morning to Hawaiian island of Kauai, where on Saturday afternoon we’ll be holding our wedding ceremony with our families and friends.

For the most part, everything has been arranged and planned, mostly thanks to Janice’s efforts, so I have little trepidation about the upcoming nuptials. It also helps that ours will be a very small ceremony, so there’s no pressure for us to pull off some sort of major production.

Janice has once and again asked me if I’d ever dreamt of getting married and what my wedding would be like, to which my answer has been a rather vexing (to her) “no”. Maybe it’s one of those “gender gap” things but I’d never really given the wedding itself much thought. It’s made planning the details a bit easier, I suppose, because we’ve had few if any contentious issues about various details of the event.

All in all, I think that the biggest reason that I feel totally relaxed about the wedding, marriage and all that is something that I’ve come increasingly to realize: life rarely unfolds the way one expects or plans. Rather than straining to wrestle our destinies with an iron grip, I think it’s best to steer from far upstream as best we can, see how things actually turn out and adjust accordingly.

I realize of course that I’ve lived a relatively charmed life, fairly free of truly trying tests, so it remains to be seen how my philosophy will hold up in the face of adversity. One thing that has changed over the recent past is that I now have someone by my side to help me meet those challenges, come what may.