The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

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Okay, so, I was asked to give a kind of a blessing at a family event and a kind of religious right of passage ceremony and friends and family gathered and just in the days before that I just sat down to reflect okay what what do I

want to say and it was sort of two two words immediately arose in my mind.

Love and time.

Love and time.

And those are not words that I usually pair together, but there they were love and time.

Love only becomes meaningful because of time, the limitations of time.

Or for anything to matter, in the sense, we have to believe in the sense we have to believe in the kind of unique irreplaceable value of something,

someone. something, someone, and so meaning and finitude are deeply linked. It's writer, philosopher Haglund, for anything to be intelligible as mattering,

they write, or anything to be at stake. We have to believe in

the irreplaceable value of someone or something that is finite.

The recognition of finitude does not offer any guarantees that we will lead a responsible

life and take better care of one another, but without the recognition of

finitude, questions of responsibility and care could not even take hold of us.

To turn toward you, to focus our gaze on another

and attach ourselves to what we see

is the deepest movement of secular confession. We are turned back to our lives,

not as something that is our property, but as a form of existence that

it's altogether finite and altogether dependent on others. This is not the end of responsibility. It is the beginning.

And so immortality might very well destroy our meaning,

our love matters because of finitude.

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