Incoherent Thought(s)

It is 4am on Tuesday, July 1 here. I've only got one more full day and I'm off to the airport on Wednesday morning. I'm really excited to go back home--and it's not that I didn't love this trip. I had a great time! But there's only so much you can do, so much you can enjoy, and so much you can learn when you know that it's all temporary.

I've been thinking about one of my favorite quotes, which ended up being the title of my blog. I spend a good amount of time reading here and everything I read, everywhere I look, I see elements of this "sophisticated ruin". When we're young, we want to be older, mature, sophisticated. We want to do things "grown-ups" do; we constantly demand to be treated like an adult without knowing what that means or accepting the consequences; we celebrate turning 18 as being an adult and being able to buy cigarettes! but not exercising the right to vote; we want to work, take care of ourselves, be independent. I'm slightly digressing from what I really want to talk about. But what is up with the eagerness to be "old"...especially with what it requires?

What I want to discuss is why being mature and "sophisticated" has to be so dreary in this time period of Western culture. When did the definition of a good person become measured by how much money she makes or busy he is? When did it become so subtly popular to compete for who slept the fewest hours? How come when you ask people how they're doing the responses are more and more "tired" than "fine"? It seems like a lot of people are so caught up in work and commitments and responsibility that they take advantage of the number one driver of happiness: relationships. I've been thinking about this a lot because I definitely fell into this "appetite for sophisticated ruin". Not as bleakly as I've described, since a lot of my commitments ARE leisure, but I am addicted to being busy. I feel like I'm a waste of space and oxygen if I don't have something to do or if I settle for what I have. That's crazy, isn't it?

I would say I'm a pretty independent person, but definitely not completely. A good chunk of the time I really enjoy being alone--reading, watching tv, eating...just stuff. But being in Hong Kong for a month by myself (not entirely alone, but at least living by myself and planning days by myself to an extent) without an obligation in the world has changed a lot of that. Why is it that we don't appreciate things until they're gone? Is the human condition really predisposed to such forgetfulness and lack of passion? In our slur of sophisticated ruin, we take advantage of the people around us so much--and when we realize it...it sucks and engulfs you with guilt. To say the least, I really miss my family, my friends, my dog, and even my acquaintances. I miss the motions of normalcy, of being important, of being loved and loving others. Even though I've met very interesting people here, I just end up talking about the people from home and sharing stories about you all. I brag a little, I poke fun a little. It's strange how when people ask me about myself I describe the people and things around me. But that's a different topic.

It started to worry me, the way we don't appreciate things until they're gone. Does it mean we don't really care? Does it mean we only like people, institutions, and things when they are useful to us? It made me kind of sad. But then I thought about this vague fact in the back of my brain from 9th grade biology about our sense of touch. This tidbit so crudely reproduced from my memory is that our nerves are constantly sending messages to our brain about things we are touching. But if each and every one of those messages were consciously processed, we'd go crazy! Imagine if every second you were thinking "I'm wearing a shirt"...that'd be nuts! So it becomes a subconscious process and we only feel or recognize things that we consciously think about or are jolted to think about by some external force that adds or removes a factor.

Maybe that's the same way with our love for people. It's not that we don't truly care about the relationships we're so lucky to have or only care about them on a superficial level. We just love so much and so often that it becomes automatic and subconscious. I'm going to choose to believe that we sometimes take advantage of the fact that we have people that love us and deserve our time, affection, and love back because we've just loved them for so long that it's just not in the foreground. And even though that's kind of sad, at least we know that all you need is some external shock or minor effort on our part to remember and act on that emotion. All you have to do is say it out loud, tell someone, or get your head out of that craphole of sophisticated ruin and LOOK at what delicate, valuable, and self-defining relationships you've got around you.

I miss you all a lot. All of you!