Sunday, June 19, 2011

There's enough complexity: Death and Being Single

There's enough complexity in life to absorb us all, so that we don't think about death.  And we don't think about patterns, that is, too much.  I admit I've been a little obsessed with sort of easy structural patterns to human behavior, mostly biological as of late.  It has been hard for me to see past the core instincts that I think a lot of us have whether we like it or not, and that is, mostly, an urge to impress the opposite sex while showing oneself off as selective. I know that our society tells single women past the age of 30 that there's something wrong with them because they are single. Maybe it doesn't happen at the club, or in the board room, but it does over breakfast tea with grandma, and with the gentle nudging from family members.  I mean, there's enough pressure on everyone already, right?  And yet, women are forced to sort of mature quicker because they face their own biology earlier in life.  I heard this reason the other day, and it stuck.  Women must face that they are aging, and that their aging marks them in some identifiable way, and that, mostly, if they want to start a family, they will have to do so before, oh, let's say, late 30s.

Men, conversely, don't have to face this fact so much.  They don't have to say to themselves that they're getting old.  I haven't seen men wearing uncomfortable but "stylish" shoes either.  They can realize, late into their 40s, that they've been living a somewhat hedonistic lifestyle, and then, assuming they have requisite money or looks, pick up a young 30s single woman, and start then, in their 40s.

No doubt, it feels shitty to be alone, or, rather, to be lonely when you don't want to be alone.  Being alone on its own can be refreshing and almost psychedelic.  Still, something gives me pause lately about being alone in a way that isn't about physicality.  It is about seeing patterns of life, and realizing that, perhaps, there simply is nothing more.  They are beautiful, and heart-wrenching, and I want so desperately to be thickly involved in them, fully ensconced, like some forbidden spring lake in an early spring heat wave-to be refreshed by sheer immersion.  I haven't been able to get that, though, ever, and it makes me want to isolate.  Isolate and what?  Find comfort that cannot be found.

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