On The Edge of Bitterness
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Most of my friends are substantially older than me. They are mostly able to look at my upcoming milestones on from the other side of accomplishment, assuring me that there is life after 30, the trials of my age do pass, and eventually new problems of an even larger sort will replace the ones I face now. When they offer their support it’s wonderful. There are times, however, when their age catches up with them.
For just about everybody I know, life didn’t turn out exactly how they imagined it when there were younger. And for most people in western society, this fact begins to work its way into some form of cynicism which inevitably hardens into some form of jaded stone. Often my friends will look at me, turning their face around suddenly and saying “That’s not how the world works. You have no idea what you’re in for. Don’t dream too big, please…” And I must give them all credit because they are all correct. I have no idea of the challenges which lay ahead of me.
I had a theory that the second give up on your dreams coming true is the very second you start to grow old. All of sudden, once cynicism descends you find yourself living in a world without miracles. Everything is expected or explainable and the magic goes away. Every once in a while I get glimpses of this in my friends as I try to protect my own innocence in believing that the problems of the world will still be fixed, and remain fixable. Ironically, its in their fierceness of protecting me that I see exactly what kind of force I am up against when it comes to breaking the status quo.
To me the protected shrink wrapped life is not worth living, even if it comes without the bitterness of giving up. But I worry that in fifteen years, when I’m the same age as they are, I will have fully succumbed to bitterness because of the curves life will have thrown me. Perhaps my friends are doing a more admirable job of teetering on the edge and maintaining their balance than I will be able to by the time I reach their age. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if my friends are right to put up such walls around me in the name of assisted self-preservation.
Right now all I know is that each day I do what I can to fight the bitterness. It takes actively scraping calloused areas away from one’s heart and running the risk of the sore opening and bleeding fresh. And as the years go on and the inevitable pain returns, it becomes more difficult to willingly stay vulnerable. But if life was about avoiding pain, we’d all be failures. I tend to think that life is about avoiding bitterness, especially when doing so seems very foolish.
Tags: angst, future, growing up