Day 70
It has been a weird few days. There's a lot going on, and as my father mentioned to my utter shock last night, there's only slightly more than a month of school until I'll be done completely. For some reason this hadn't occurred to me. But, with more essays, exams and presentations pending than I'd care to list, the light at the end of the tunnel is still dim and distant.
And to be honest (this is one of these rare occasions that I'll inflict you with personal life stuff), this is the first time in a very long time that I can honestly call myself single in the fullest sense. Relationships have been coming and going with varying degrees of success, but more to the point there's never been much time between the going of one and the coming of the next. Periods of my life classified in this way, have been bumping into each other; in some ways even literally, from my perspective at least.
"There's no rush." This is the kind of lesson that no one relationship could teach a person.
The comedian/social commentator Chris Rock tells us: "People say life is short. No it isn't. Life is long, especially if you make the wrong decisions." I wonder about this, and as I grow older I begin to get what I hope to be a better sense of the bigger picture.
There are few things in the world that I hate more than fighting about nothing. But the fight is compelling.
I'm never any good at saying how I feel. But these last few days, I feel the way an intersection with no orange lights might feel.
Father and I raise our glasses over dinner. "A cheers to women, and all their ways." I could never stress just how important family is. Perhaps the connection is social, perhaps genetic, perhaps both, but I value my family because we never turn our backs on each other. We don't lie to each other. We don't gossip, we don't play silly games, we don't bad mouth. More importantly are the things we do do: We seek to understand, to be compassionate, to reach common ground in the rare case of a problem or disagreement. We phone each other, just to see how things are; to check up, to ask the right questions. And we know what the right questions are, and how to ask them. No matter how much time passes without contact, feelings never change. Stories are all that need to be made up for.
"Don't worry about the women. You need to get good grades."
"But what about new women?"
"You've got plenty of time for that."
Wittgenstein writes: "If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult."
And to be honest (this is one of these rare occasions that I'll inflict you with personal life stuff), this is the first time in a very long time that I can honestly call myself single in the fullest sense. Relationships have been coming and going with varying degrees of success, but more to the point there's never been much time between the going of one and the coming of the next. Periods of my life classified in this way, have been bumping into each other; in some ways even literally, from my perspective at least.
"There's no rush." This is the kind of lesson that no one relationship could teach a person.
The comedian/social commentator Chris Rock tells us: "People say life is short. No it isn't. Life is long, especially if you make the wrong decisions." I wonder about this, and as I grow older I begin to get what I hope to be a better sense of the bigger picture.
There are few things in the world that I hate more than fighting about nothing. But the fight is compelling.
I'm never any good at saying how I feel. But these last few days, I feel the way an intersection with no orange lights might feel.
Father and I raise our glasses over dinner. "A cheers to women, and all their ways." I could never stress just how important family is. Perhaps the connection is social, perhaps genetic, perhaps both, but I value my family because we never turn our backs on each other. We don't lie to each other. We don't gossip, we don't play silly games, we don't bad mouth. More importantly are the things we do do: We seek to understand, to be compassionate, to reach common ground in the rare case of a problem or disagreement. We phone each other, just to see how things are; to check up, to ask the right questions. And we know what the right questions are, and how to ask them. No matter how much time passes without contact, feelings never change. Stories are all that need to be made up for.
"Don't worry about the women. You need to get good grades."
"But what about new women?"
"You've got plenty of time for that."
Wittgenstein writes: "If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult."
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