Day 124
Apparently I am girl crazy. This is what more than one friend has told me in the last few days. But it has always been that way to a cartain extent; I'll go and buy groceries, or whatever else, and develop a huge crush on the cashier for all of five minutes, only to completely forget by the time I'm half way home.
This, with the one exception of the cashier at the British sweet shop.
I contemplate quite often the truism of our culture that the good looking are somehow more difficult to attain, or in some sense more intimiadting. I just assume prima facie that some particularly beautiful girl won't ever date me, but this is a weird assumption for multiple reasons. The foremost of these, I believe, is the forgettence that beauty is purely transient in more than one way. We all grow old, wrinkly, decrepid, and so forth. But more quickly, we lose a sense of the physical beauty of people once we are able to have them physically. You all know what I mean here: no matter how much we idolize the body of another, once we're accustomed to having that body for ourselves it loses that extraordinary appeal. I see a boyfriend who is just sick of his gorgeous girlfriend, and initially I can't possibly imagine why. But it is very much the case that when he sees her, he sees something very different from what I see.
The more one is willing and able to reflect, the more one realizes that it is impossible to look at a person, to try to understand them, to get a sense of them, without imbuing into that sense a set of implicit prescriptions and assumptions of one's own.
And as this is the case, we are left to ponder the even more cryptic trusim that as we get to know someone over a long time, and we start to see who they 'really are' more clearly, we may just be recognizing the same qualities in them that they had all along, except through a new lens on account of our having changed.
I am very quick to judge people (positively or negatively), to be honest. This is in some sense a very useful quality (I use 'quality' and not 'ability' on purpose here), because it offers a layer of protection, but in another way it is a very destructive quality, because it sets up premature assumptions that are difficult to shake.
Often in life we need to seek a new paradigm of thought in order to understand something, rather than to seek more evidence and observation.
This, with the one exception of the cashier at the British sweet shop.
I contemplate quite often the truism of our culture that the good looking are somehow more difficult to attain, or in some sense more intimiadting. I just assume prima facie that some particularly beautiful girl won't ever date me, but this is a weird assumption for multiple reasons. The foremost of these, I believe, is the forgettence that beauty is purely transient in more than one way. We all grow old, wrinkly, decrepid, and so forth. But more quickly, we lose a sense of the physical beauty of people once we are able to have them physically. You all know what I mean here: no matter how much we idolize the body of another, once we're accustomed to having that body for ourselves it loses that extraordinary appeal. I see a boyfriend who is just sick of his gorgeous girlfriend, and initially I can't possibly imagine why. But it is very much the case that when he sees her, he sees something very different from what I see.
The more one is willing and able to reflect, the more one realizes that it is impossible to look at a person, to try to understand them, to get a sense of them, without imbuing into that sense a set of implicit prescriptions and assumptions of one's own.
And as this is the case, we are left to ponder the even more cryptic trusim that as we get to know someone over a long time, and we start to see who they 'really are' more clearly, we may just be recognizing the same qualities in them that they had all along, except through a new lens on account of our having changed.
I am very quick to judge people (positively or negatively), to be honest. This is in some sense a very useful quality (I use 'quality' and not 'ability' on purpose here), because it offers a layer of protection, but in another way it is a very destructive quality, because it sets up premature assumptions that are difficult to shake.
Often in life we need to seek a new paradigm of thought in order to understand something, rather than to seek more evidence and observation.
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