maybe commitment is the most beautiful thing

let what you love alter you

A friend of mine has a problem. She wants to have children and she wants to have them soon (like the rest of us, she isn’t getting any younger). She’s in a relationship—not a new one, not an old one—it’s a relationship that’s somewhere in between it all, in that uneasy middle ground: a couple of years long, enough good times to stay together, enough bad times to question whether she should. Her family and her friends think he’s good enough. She isn’t sure what she thinks. Mostly, she thought she’d have figured it out by now. “I thought my life would be different,” she tells me all the time.

I think about her often, especially when I’m in my own moments of ambivalence.

I try to think of decisions in terms of Mr. Clean’s framework of type 1 (two-way door) and type 2 (trap-door) decisions—those that are reversible and those that aren’t.

But, other than becoming a parent, what trap-door decisions are left in life? How many truly exist today? I can’t think of many. There’s always command + z, a return policy, a one-way ticket. Culturally, we’ve come to believe that movement is the same as freedom. We leave jobs, cities, and relationships without looking back, certain that there will always be other paths that will open to us.

In an essay I read in 2011, when I was a baby designer, the author questioned the loss of finality—the kind that once accompanied a photograph or a film, an object that couldn’t be changed once it was “unleashed in the world.” She wrote:

And so I began to wonder whether iterative practice could actually begin to erode one of the most valuable (but seldom acknowledged) tools in a designer’s repertoire: his or her judgment.

I find myself missing the idea of designing in a way that involves some degree of finality—of synthesizing all inputs to arrive not at a solution, but the solution—one that inspires conviction. And holding myself accountable when I ultimately fail, but learning in a way that affects me at my core.

I keep coming back to that phrase: “one that inspires conviction.” Conviction. The act of standing behind something, fully. The act of being rooted in something, allowing something larger than yourself to shape the contours of your life.

What strikes me is how little conviction seems to matter now—not just in what we believe, but in how we live. History is filled with stories of people who believed in something so deeply that they devoted their lives to the pursuit of that belief: artists, revolutionaries, environmentalists, monks. They chose a center and built their lives around it. Undoubtedly, they too experienced moments of doubt (ha). Instead of turning away, they followed that doubt through to the other side. Even their doubt had direction, one that led them toward a deeper understanding of their devotion.

We don’t talk enough about the courage of living according to your convictions; of saying no to the endless horizon of possibilities. We live in a society that reveres optionality, but maybe what we need is the opposite: a willingness to choose, to stand for something, to be still somewhere and say, unabashedly, this is what I believe in, this is what I love.

Commitment, then, is the expression of conviction. It’s the practice of giving form to what you believe, of translating ideals into action, talent into art—making the abstract tangible. Commitment is not about certainty. It’s about, I think, the willingness to be wrong, and to be changed by what you’ve chosen. In love, to choose someone—to commit to someone—is to close the door on an infinity of possible futures. It’s to say: this one. This is the life I’ll make real.

To live with conviction is vulnerable. It’s to let what you love alter you. It means deciding that some things are worth the cost of permanence—and in doing so, to earn the privilege of bearing witness to what time can make of love, of work, of faith.

Mimi encouraged designers to “keep a drawer of your mistakes. But design like there’s no tomorrow.” I’m trying to live like that too.

Finality, I think, can be beautiful, in and of itself. There’s something holy, sacred, in saying: I am here, and I’m not going anywhere.