Forging the Path

After the tumultuous last few days, which have been tumultuous only inside my mind, and in fact perfectly calm and harmonious on the outside, today is the calm after the storm.  The growing inferiority complex had, I believe, been made more obvious by travelling, rather than created by it, removing, as travelling does, many of the various reasons or causes we attribute to things in daily life. Alongside that, travelling gives you time to think. It shows you your inadequacies, it brings you to your knees under the weight of them, but it does give you time, not only to consider them in the first place, but to work out a resolution. How much, I wonder, do we have going on under the surface as we battle the more prosaic parts of our everyday lives? As we get up, go to work, do the washing, go to the bank, are there storms brewing which we don’t have the time to face? Do they come out in other ways? In the sniping between husband and wife, which leads so many of us to make the sort of annoying snide comments M and I heard so much in the run up to our wedding, (“oh this is the beginning of the end, you won’t be so dewey eyed later” etc. etc. ad nauseum and beyond.) Or in the casual yet oh so depressing cynicism, (“Well that sounds too good to be true”, “yeah the kids are nice now. Just wait till they grew up. They’ll be corrupted soon enough.” Life, apparently, is a bitch. And then you die.)

We walk and talk. M and I are good at that, and either walking or eating are our prime times for forgetting time, appointments or the washing up, and just having a good old natter. It’s something I love about him. He doesn’t mind entering into a philosophical debate. Or running about talking in silly voices and generally being silly. There are a lot of things M doesn’t mind doing. It helps, if you’re going to be married to whimsical old me.

M says he wonders about the generally accepted idea that everybody gets jaded as they get older.  He looked at a photo recently, of us on our wedding day, only just over a year ago, and noted how much younger we looked. It was, he thinks, a certain light in our eyes, that did it. Have we, I ask him worriedly, lost that light now? Is it inevitable? Do people older than a certain age, or on days other than specific celebrations, no longer have a light?  Do we lose our twinkle?

Neither of us want to accept that. We talk about the last few days in which I have fought, lost and then belatedly won a battle with just that concept, that dying of the light.  But, as I say again to M, I just don’t think that’s OK. I’m not willing to say that life is just like that. If something is wrong, there is always something you can do to make it better. And it isn’t OK to lie back and accept bad behaviour in yourself based on an idea that it is going to be inevitable. It isn’t. But it takes effort and heartache.

M says he thinks that part of this widespread attitude that becoming jaded is unavoidable, is based on our culture, which celebrates the beginning of things but not the duration. We mark a wedding day, but do not necessarily remember, daily, how lucky we are to be together. We mark anniversaries of the occasion, but sometimes forget that what we are celebrating is not the occasion, but its ongoing state. We don’t celebrate the status quo, even when the status quo is brimfull of things worth celebrating. The same is true of New Year, of Christmas, of any public holiday.

But to work against this idea of the gradual depreciation in value of our spirit, or of our lives in general, does take effort, and to work against what may or may not be a ‘natural’ slippage in the way we treat one another, the way we view life, the way we respond to a challenge, takes the sort of painful facing of the truth which I have found so brutal over the last few days. When the effort itself is painful, it’s hard to tell whether there is enough of a reward to justify it.

And there is as always, that slippery ‘balance’ to be obtained. Being hard on ourselves will make us hard on others and continually miserable. To allow ourselves the sort of acceptance, patience and willingness to empathise we might offer to others, but at the same time to keep focus on the necessity of the effort involved to curb the more negative of our natural spirals, is incredibly difficult, perhaps even impossible.

Life, we agree, if it is to be lived with a goal of being happy and imbuing others around us with happiness, is a series of little tweaks. You have to be mindful, watchful, always of tendencies in your self and your circumstances, that may be heading, however subtly, in a downwards direction, and make small adjustments to put it back on track.

It’s a great metaphor, and a wise truth. But hard to know precisely where the ‘track’ is.

There are a lot of Christian metaphors about pathways. My favourite has always been in Pilgrim’s Progress, in which the main protagonist has to choose between a tough looking pathway, overgrown and steep, and a rather more pleasant walkway, wider and greener. The latter looks good, but it doesn’t lead anywhere. It is the harder route that will really take him to his final destination. The reason I like this one is that the protagonist doesn’t have any information. He sees two  pathways, both claiming to lead to the same place. I have often felt that causal references to taking the road least travelled by, or to walking the narrow path are a little glib. Yes if I knew that, and had that information and was literally standing at a cross roads looking at a narrow path and a wide one, I would of course chose the narrow. If I was literally making a choice of walking partner, between a glowing light and a warm, welcoming pair of holy arms and a cackling hooligan in a red suit with a pitchfork, I’d walk with the former. (Even if the latter, in that particular picture, does actually sound like the more interesting partner).

But it isn’t that simple. Good does not always look good, wise disguises itself as stupid, paths are not laid out, but have to be forged.

“It’s a minefield, really,” I say to M, “if you talk about things or self examine too  much you start navel gazing and lose perspective or you become one of those ultra emotional hysterics who have to discuss everything in fine detail for hours only getting themselves all het up in the process. If you ignore things you sink into habits which later you find harder to resolve.”

He agrees. There is a pause. We have walked a 20 kilometre round trip and we have not found the answer.

“How long would you have to walk before you figured out the perfect anti-jading solution?”, I wonder.

“I don’t know,” says M, “perhaps all your life?”