I discovered this summer that flip-flops are one of humanity’s greatest inventions. Slip them on and stuffy, formal worries about retirement plans, paying for college, and money-market accounts fade to vapor.
What the hell have I got to worry about? My bride and I are “thinking” about further procreation. I am not the great Catholic “let’s have 25 kids and piss of the population-control types” … but I really think there is no bad in having kids. We are fortunate to be fertile, have reasonable means, and are both (relatively) emotionally stable. The “war on terror” has not yet arrived in the metro area. The idea is this: struggle and “difficulty” are what helps us to really live. Along with cute sayings and their adorable looks when they are little, kids bring that in spades.
A friend of mine describes someone he knows well as being lonely and lost. He apparently inherited more than he needs to avoid work. Sounds great, eh? He dabbles in this and that, and spends lots of time shopping for big-screen TVs, Harleys, and houses. I am confident that he is a good man, better than me, but his situation seems to leave him somewhat adrift. “He has no real responsibilities,” my friend observes. Nothing to keep him in the game. He can’t seem to find a girlfriend worthy of his time. The American Dream of independent wealth seems to have left him a slave to his own whims. Isolated and aimless.
The opposite side -- so we think -- is slavery to mundane responsibilities. I need to get to work, put up with my boss, deal with idiots, suffer abuse, come home to an exhausted spouse, fighting and complaints, pay bills late, miss out on this and that due to a lack of funds and/or pressing responsibilities, and basically not get the things I think I want.
There are a few hundred country songs out there that convey a truly sappy message about how the writer finds joy in his or her relationships in the midst of problems and difficulties (broken fridge, not enough money, etc.). I am sometimes irked by the over-simplification you find in many country songs, but this particular sentiment is dead-on. The counter-intuitive reality is that the things we are constantly looking for – that we believe will fulfill us, are sometimes the very trap that isolates us. It is struggle, process, “not-yet arriving” that draws us to each other, and to meaningful relationships.
The funny thing is, we are already and always unavoidably in the middle of this, whether we like it or not. I wonder if we wouldn’t be better off to just relax and appreciate things a bit more. A beer with friends, yakking about our troubles is not wasted time. It is life itself.
