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arguchik(please excuse my presumptuous use of the 2nd person...)
i've been thinking a lot about precariousness and vulnerability. a precarious life...when you step out of the line that most people are standing in, waiting in...the storyline that most people want, indeed expect, to live. the storyline that many people either are waiting to begin--waiting to meet "the one," to get the dream job, buy the dream home, have the dream children and the dream breed of dog; or are living...but they're still waiting for happily-ever-after to kick in, because "the one" turns out to have an incompatibile life plan, or the new boss is a boor, or the house has a leaky roof, the kid has ADD, and the dog pees on the special-order berber carpet. when your awareness of the situation changes--and i do think it's 99% about awareness--something happens. you find yourself out of line, faced with the unavoidable fact that you are on a different trajectory than the one you had envisioned for yourself, the one you planned and worked and saved for, the one you thought you had every right to expect. i have to believe this happens to everyone at some point in their lives, but i also know that not everyone stays "out there." it's so easy to deny the truth, to numb that feeling of precariousness with one of the many escapes and security blankets afforded by U.S. consumer culture. i used to think it (the feeling of precariousness) resulted from the void that yawns at the bottom of all attempts to process raw experience into meaning. i still think that's there, but it's too grandiose, too existential and conceptual. i try to think in more immediate terms these days, because i think we humans have a bad habit of exaggerating our place in the cosmos. so i think the feeling begins in a closer place: the heart, that metaphorical basket to which we relegate all things inexplicable, emotional, unconscious...which means, things that don't fit our ideas about cause, effect, and order. "the void" begins to seem more like a rationalization than a philosophical concept...a device for avoiding the real root, which is much more basic, common, and therefore embarrassing to admit: it's the desire to belong, to be recognized and valued and loved, a desire that seems very much at risk of going unfulfilled when you feel as though you have stepped away from the bulk of humanity. but that's just more grandiosity, isn't it? how arrogant, to think that you could step away so far, make such a radical break that your chance of meeting and befriending kindred spirits goes effectively to zero. is anyone that unique? it's a catch-22, too...because you have to feel like you're unique, individual, special, in order to feel lovable, and that's where precariousness connects to vulnerability. you have to make yourself vulnerable in order to find out whether or not someone is a kindred spirit. if they are, you have to become more vulnerable still, in order to connect with them in a meaningful way, dancing very carefully along the sharp edge that separates desire from need, and the unique or strange from the pedestrian. the thing is, vulnerability compounds at every step: each new revelation could be the one that breaks the deal, the one that shows how irremediably strange and creepy you are, or how hopelessly ordinary and dull. i think we all try to avoid the implications of vulnerability: existentially, i guess you could say it's about impermanence, the unsettling fact that the vast majority (possibly the totality) of the people you meet, befriend, and love will not be there for the duration of your life. you will lose people who are very dear to you, people you love like breathing. your heart will break again and again. you may even be tempted never to love again, because the odds of loss are so high. but that's not an answer i can live with, so i'm trying to learn the trick to rolling with the vicissitudes of love and loss...of friends, lovers, family, pets... so far it seems to mean accepting vulnerability as a permanent state, and resisting the urge to plug up all the holes in my armor. staying porous to pain so that beauty can get in too.
i've been thinking a lot about precariousness and vulnerability. a precarious life...when you step out of the line that most people are standing in, waiting in...the storyline that most people want, indeed expect, to live. the storyline that many people either are waiting to begin--waiting to meet "the one," to get the dream job, buy the dream home, have the dream children and the dream breed of dog; or are living...but they're still waiting for happily-ever-after to kick in, because "the one" turns out to have an incompatibile life plan, or the new boss is a boor, or the house has a leaky roof, the kid has ADD, and the dog pees on the special-order berber carpet. when your awareness of the situation changes--and i do think it's 99% about awareness--something happens. you find yourself out of line, faced with the unavoidable fact that you are on a different trajectory than the one you had envisioned for yourself, the one you planned and worked and saved for, the one you thought you had every right to expect. i have to believe this happens to everyone at some point in their lives, but i also know that not everyone stays "out there." it's so easy to deny the truth, to numb that feeling of precariousness with one of the many escapes and security blankets afforded by U.S. consumer culture. i used to think it (the feeling of precariousness) resulted from the void that yawns at the bottom of all attempts to process raw experience into meaning. i still think that's there, but it's too grandiose, too existential and conceptual. i try to think in more immediate terms these days, because i think we humans have a bad habit of exaggerating our place in the cosmos. so i think the feeling begins in a closer place: the heart, that metaphorical basket to which we relegate all things inexplicable, emotional, unconscious...which means, things that don't fit our ideas about cause, effect, and order. "the void" begins to seem more like a rationalization than a philosophical concept...a device for avoiding the real root, which is much more basic, common, and therefore embarrassing to admit: it's the desire to belong, to be recognized and valued and loved, a desire that seems very much at risk of going unfulfilled when you feel as though you have stepped away from the bulk of humanity. but that's just more grandiosity, isn't it? how arrogant, to think that you could step away so far, make such a radical break that your chance of meeting and befriending kindred spirits goes effectively to zero. is anyone that unique? it's a catch-22, too...because you have to feel like you're unique, individual, special, in order to feel lovable, and that's where precariousness connects to vulnerability. you have to make yourself vulnerable in order to find out whether or not someone is a kindred spirit. if they are, you have to become more vulnerable still, in order to connect with them in a meaningful way, dancing very carefully along the sharp edge that separates desire from need, and the unique or strange from the pedestrian. the thing is, vulnerability compounds at every step: each new revelation could be the one that breaks the deal, the one that shows how irremediably strange and creepy you are, or how hopelessly ordinary and dull. i think we all try to avoid the implications of vulnerability: existentially, i guess you could say it's about impermanence, the unsettling fact that the vast majority (possibly the totality) of the people you meet, befriend, and love will not be there for the duration of your life. you will lose people who are very dear to you, people you love like breathing. your heart will break again and again. you may even be tempted never to love again, because the odds of loss are so high. but that's not an answer i can live with, so i'm trying to learn the trick to rolling with the vicissitudes of love and loss...of friends, lovers, family, pets... so far it seems to mean accepting vulnerability as a permanent state, and resisting the urge to plug up all the holes in my armor. staying porous to pain so that beauty can get in too.
