Love is the one topic that people never seem to stop writing about. This fascination peaks my interest constantly and I'm always polling newly engaged couples, married couples, single friends, gay friends, straight friends, divorced friends and anyone that lies in between doing covert research to satisfy in my own mind why this fascination exists and what it ultimately means. Wait! (as the "romantics" thus far have already tried to close their browser and wash my negative and condescending voice from their memories).
I am a romantic! (well.... in some sense of the word.)
Webster defines romantic for us in a few ways:
1: consisting of or resembling romance (thanks so much Webster that sums it all up)
2: having no basis in fact: Imaginary
3. impractical in conception or plan: Visionary
4: marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized
Though I'm not sure what Webster exactly means by his definitions and am fairly certain that they may not refer to anything romantic at all.... I prefer Aristotle's definition (as paraphrased by Ayn Rand n the preface of The Fountainhead:
[Romanticism] is concerned not with things as they are, but with things as they might and ought to be.
This is how I'm a romantic. I don't think there is anything wrong with wanting things (love included) to be the way they ought to be. If you don't want things to be the way they ought to be - does that make you a cynic? Are these the only two categories for us all- or is there more on the board?
One of the things that fascinates me most with the concept of love is that it's not provable (well in an absolute sense). As a practical application of this thought - if your best friend tells you she's in love with the guy she met last night - how do you know whether she really is or isn't? On that same line of thinking, if you ask your husband (or wife) to prove the he/she loves you - what would that look like? The intangible relativity of love affords it a certain flexibility that makes it elusive yet incredibly desirable at the same time. The most interesting cases to me are when love appears to vanish. When you and your partner decide that you don't, after all, love one another (enough I suppose to stay together just for definition purposes), does that mean that the love between you never really existed in the first place? - that it changed character somewhere along the way into a temporal state of love? - or that you truly loved yourself and your definition of love enough to walk away before compromising either ideal. And when you've walked away - can you find love again? Do you deserve to - or was that your one shot at the whole thing?
I don't think there are right answers or wrong answers to any of these questions. I know that we all have certain expectations - both cultivated on our own and given to us by society. I think the fascination with love is that it makes people do things they wouldn't ordinarily do or affords other people things they would not normally be able to afford. We all pay a price - whether it be emotional, monetary, or physical - to generate our own ideal concept of love. These concepts are not one-size-fits-all therefore no one can safely judge whether the price is worth it for another.
Just make sure you set the price for yourself and that what you make of it is always worth the price it takes to keep it. Maybe if we focused more on assessing whether we're living up to our own ideals and less time assessing whether others are living up to ours, we'd all be happier and more in love than before.
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Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Addicted to Achievement?
So this post may not mean anything without a little bit of background. Also, since it's my first post, some additional information may also help put future posts in context.
A little about me:
Where to begin? Well, like Dickens I guess at the beginning would be most appropriate. I had an ideal childhood, I suppose (ideal being a relative descriptor of course). I had successful and loving parents, grew up in the suburbs, siblings that I am close with, and went to the best private schools. We didn't have a white picket fence but we lived in a red brick house on a cul-de-sac where the sun seemed to shine longer just so I could ride my pink Schwinn. I was a cheerleader in high school, made good grades, and served on my student council. I probably sound like half a dozen people you know. We might have been friends in high school or college. I could have sat next to you in home room. When it came time for college, I - much to my father's uncontainable glee - was accepted to every school I applied to (except one but we'll save that experience for a later post). In college, I had a lot of friends (and a lot of fun) and managed to graduate on time with two degrees and a minor. After school, I immediately received an offer to work for a respected corporation during a difficult time in the economy. I happily accepted and took 2 months off before eagerly embarking on my career in corporate America.
So now that you have some insight into my Stepford-like existence, I'll move on to the topic that I intended to blog about today: achievement. From a young age, I was nurtured to "always try your best." Somewhere along the way, the message became wired in my brain as "always be the best." In fine print (and coated with a little bitter-sweet experience), one can easily see the important distinction between these two phrases as the former is attainable whilst the latter is not. The real question I ask myself is, "Did I misinterpret the message or was this a product of years and years of subtle brainwashing?" How did the careful grooming of my childhood result in this quest for unattainable perfection? Was it my parents (almost too easy to go that route with the blame)? Was it the neatly manicured halls of my private school and all the lessons learned within? Was it my Barbie (gasp!) complete with her accomplices Ken and Kikki (the ethnic friend), her townhome and pink corvette? Or was it me...
I'm not sure when I began this unhealthy addiction to ahcievement. What about the drug do I most enjoy? - my father's praise? the envy of others? the comfort of knowing I could get what society deemed it was important to have?
One thing that remains unspoken in Stepford is that the quest for succcess (*note here that I don't mean your personal definition of success, I mean the one that society gives us - complete with high-powered jobs, fancy cars, and big houses) that we are directed to embrace at such an early age is littered with uncertainty and the corpses of dreams we may have had but were encouraged to barter for the promise of something better. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, I'm concerned that after my endless journey on the yellow brick road of achievement, I'll pull back the curtain to find a short, powerless, holllow wizard that I never recall wanting to meet in the first place.
What brought on this sudden epiphany worthy of my first post you may ask (as the air does indeed smell sweeter in Stepford)? Well, I failed at something. Me. Yes, though I have succeeded at a job that is highly regarded, have run miles and miles to ensure that I remain fit and attractive, have color coded my outlook calendar to ensure that I have ample time with friends and family while still maintaining my workholic image at the office - I overlooked something and subsequently failed. The endless preparation since birth and careful and privileged upbringing did not insulate me from failure. What bothers me most about the glaring defeat is that somehow, I let it cancel out all my other achievements, bringing me to the question of whether they ever meant anything to me in the first place.
So, I put this out there into the virual universe for myself and for you. To stay on the yellow brick road or to jump off into the unknown - I don't have an answer for myself. Nor am I promising you that I will in the near future. The only piece of advice I can give is to look ahead on whatever road you are on and every once in awhile look up just because you want to. Because the journey may be more important than the destination and one day when you get there, you may smile at all those times you stopped walking to look up and wish you had more often.
(thanks for reading if you got this far).
A little about me:
Where to begin? Well, like Dickens I guess at the beginning would be most appropriate. I had an ideal childhood, I suppose (ideal being a relative descriptor of course). I had successful and loving parents, grew up in the suburbs, siblings that I am close with, and went to the best private schools. We didn't have a white picket fence but we lived in a red brick house on a cul-de-sac where the sun seemed to shine longer just so I could ride my pink Schwinn. I was a cheerleader in high school, made good grades, and served on my student council. I probably sound like half a dozen people you know. We might have been friends in high school or college. I could have sat next to you in home room. When it came time for college, I - much to my father's uncontainable glee - was accepted to every school I applied to (except one but we'll save that experience for a later post). In college, I had a lot of friends (and a lot of fun) and managed to graduate on time with two degrees and a minor. After school, I immediately received an offer to work for a respected corporation during a difficult time in the economy. I happily accepted and took 2 months off before eagerly embarking on my career in corporate America.
So now that you have some insight into my Stepford-like existence, I'll move on to the topic that I intended to blog about today: achievement. From a young age, I was nurtured to "always try your best." Somewhere along the way, the message became wired in my brain as "always be the best." In fine print (and coated with a little bitter-sweet experience), one can easily see the important distinction between these two phrases as the former is attainable whilst the latter is not. The real question I ask myself is, "Did I misinterpret the message or was this a product of years and years of subtle brainwashing?" How did the careful grooming of my childhood result in this quest for unattainable perfection? Was it my parents (almost too easy to go that route with the blame)? Was it the neatly manicured halls of my private school and all the lessons learned within? Was it my Barbie (gasp!) complete with her accomplices Ken and Kikki (the ethnic friend), her townhome and pink corvette? Or was it me...
I'm not sure when I began this unhealthy addiction to ahcievement. What about the drug do I most enjoy? - my father's praise? the envy of others? the comfort of knowing I could get what society deemed it was important to have?
One thing that remains unspoken in Stepford is that the quest for succcess (*note here that I don't mean your personal definition of success, I mean the one that society gives us - complete with high-powered jobs, fancy cars, and big houses) that we are directed to embrace at such an early age is littered with uncertainty and the corpses of dreams we may have had but were encouraged to barter for the promise of something better. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, I'm concerned that after my endless journey on the yellow brick road of achievement, I'll pull back the curtain to find a short, powerless, holllow wizard that I never recall wanting to meet in the first place.
What brought on this sudden epiphany worthy of my first post you may ask (as the air does indeed smell sweeter in Stepford)? Well, I failed at something. Me. Yes, though I have succeeded at a job that is highly regarded, have run miles and miles to ensure that I remain fit and attractive, have color coded my outlook calendar to ensure that I have ample time with friends and family while still maintaining my workholic image at the office - I overlooked something and subsequently failed. The endless preparation since birth and careful and privileged upbringing did not insulate me from failure. What bothers me most about the glaring defeat is that somehow, I let it cancel out all my other achievements, bringing me to the question of whether they ever meant anything to me in the first place.
So, I put this out there into the virual universe for myself and for you. To stay on the yellow brick road or to jump off into the unknown - I don't have an answer for myself. Nor am I promising you that I will in the near future. The only piece of advice I can give is to look ahead on whatever road you are on and every once in awhile look up just because you want to. Because the journey may be more important than the destination and one day when you get there, you may smile at all those times you stopped walking to look up and wish you had more often.
(thanks for reading if you got this far).
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