As we grow old, our opinions grow stronger. By responding habitually to challenges, we think we have learned about life. As a child, one is fascinated by a train or a bridge, but as adults, we are almost dead to the feeling of marvel, enquiry or humility.
But the world does not become static. Challenges keep coming in, and the inadequacy of our responses keeps showing itself.
It is so visible to me at this stage in life how people start getting settled down in their own family and career. But more frightening is the settling down of opinions. This is what I call getting old.
At this age, we make certain "investments" in our life. This is the period of exhileration for some, but of fear to most. We spend our days in happy dreams of the days to come and in anxiety that our well-laid plans might somehow go wrong. The foremost investment is in our world view which we hold on to more strongly than anything.
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The desire for a family has various sources. One of them is a wish to have a group of people to whom one doesn't have to defend oneself. Who accept one as one is. A relationship in which challenges are absent. In other relationships, one is constantly reminded that one is far from the goal.
Home is a place where there are no challenges (or so one wishes).
As we grow older, our ability to respond to new challenges fades. Hence the desire for a challenge-less abode grows stronger. Responding to our sexual nature is one of these challenges. And the spouse provides a way to respond in a way which is not rife with feelings of anxiety (or so one wishes).
These wishes are hardly ever fulfilled.
Wishing to settle down is capitulation. One bows under, as it were, the heavy burden of life. To stand up and throw the burden away is a momentous task, no doubt, but a task worthy of any human.
To be human is to overcome. To chip away challenges is an escape.
To escape is to exclude certain things from one's life.
It is a very sad thing to watch someone in pain of exclusion. Bereft of love, in confusion but drifting on due to one's inertia, shutting questioning out, shutting questioners out.
The true measure of a friend is found in the balance of acceptance and questioning. I accept you, but dare you accept yourself! I do not want to question you, but my friend, question yourself.
I ask nothing more of you.
And nothing less.