Self-Preservation

I grew up with little to show for the hard-earned life my mother had worked so diligently to preserve; but there was happiness there. In retrospect, I wish I had stopped more often to tell my mother I loved her, or that I appreciated the things she provided for me, even the bare-minimum material things. What it means to be young means the same as being naÃ?¯ve all the time; expecting that you will delight in the simple things; and holding on to trivial moments that eventually fall through the sieve of experience. I’m finding happiness is the appreciation of still waters; a cliff-side view of the calm, when you are content simply because there are no crashing waves. Reality is taking the plunge, belly-down.

It is too often taken for granted that independence is the answer to everything. You get unsettled and start growing out of your skin. You get older, things move fast. You move on from just about every routine you’ve lived for the past two decades. Twenties life is a highway with billboards of experience flying by; leaving you only with blurred renditions of color and sound. Then you wake up one day, and you’re alone. And that loneliness is debilitating. It strips you of your being, your mortality. It’s so frightening that it freezes you, down to the marrow of your soul. Cries for help are shameful; you’re an adult. You’re just considered weird, different, or unapproachable to the majority who haven’t the strength to break away and grow up themselves.

I understand that life is all about survival of the fittest; but Darwin himself knew that it is not only for the strong to survive. What happens to us middle-men? Do we just go on living routine lives, striving for that spoon-fed dream of a college education, marriage by your mid-twenties, family by early thirties, clock in, clock out, and retire? What makes leaders, leaders? What constitutes a good success story these days? What special circumstances promoted these people to the boardrooms of Initiative and Opportunity? We settle for the realization that the world needs its regular people for balance. I just don’t understand why I’m one of them.

They say the youth of this era take too long to discover who they are; that they don’t appreciate the value of a hard-earned dollar or an education. But maybe it’s just that we won’t settle. After all, isn’t it true that our fathers and grandfathers have devoted their livelihoods to the preservation of their future generationsâÂ?¦inadvertently handing down the callous-free luxury of stalling for happenstance, or of idling in the consigned flexibility of waiting to make the right decisions? Is it possible the answer is that this generation just lacks direction? Where do you start and where do you go? How do you know what’s right is right? Has it turned out that life is just a storybook heirloom of trial and error; its pages swelling with every subsequent generation? Too bad innovation and savoir-faire weren’t documented in ancestral Wills.

Mediocrity is quicksand, and this quicksand is only a thin layer above stagnancy. Have you ever gotten so deep in mediocrity, you felt like you were dying in stagnancy? Like in the haze of living life, you decide to stop and smell the flowers, but instead you inhale an overwhelming and sudden overdose of reality. And you’re paralyzed in the realization that as fast as you’ve been running, you’ve just been running in place the whole time. Reality is the medicinal barium tonic; Happiness is just the sweetener. Yet, they make it sound like it’s an everlasting solution; as if all your hard work and all the good people you surround yourself with will put you in this un-dissolving state of contentment. Who would buy that? You’re better off sticking with the samples for that quick-dissolve symptom fix.

You push through the bog of adolescence, in hopes of finding ground more bright and stable. What you get instead is a sense of urgency. Your life all of a sudden is incomplete, and you’re not getting any younger. In your quest to stabilize yourself, everything around you is constantly changing. You inescapably put yourself in a conundrum of preserving your youthful happiness. So, with every new job offer, every new place to live, every new haircut, you force yourself to experience a momentary lapse of joy, accomplishment. But it fades, because it’s not the real thing; the thing they’re always selling called Happiness. You work your fingers to the bone, and eat the crow they tell you has to be eaten, because ‘you’re still young and learning’. But when you finally get there, then what? Even Sniff and Scurry will eventually discover every corridor and run out of cheese. Nothing ever was, nor will it ever be the same. And you have the choice of fighting the changing quicksand or lying still until you hit bottom.

So how do you cope, how do you mourn the loss of yourself? And better yet, how do you create yourself and start living life all over again? After all, you are just a fetus in this every-changing, ever expanding placenta they call Life, waiting to be birthed into some new and exciting opportunity.

I always supposed the best solution was to go back to your roots. But it’s like reading a book a second time over; everything is different. And the things that were so grandiose in excitement are mere follies now. Maybe I’m just missing something less obvious here. Maybe there is some unspoken, unwritten, and definitely undemonstrated secret that the coven of happy people keeps well-preserved from us pessimist types. I doubt it though. One theory just seems too easy: create goals, work hard to realize those goals, and happiness will be the inevitable reward. If that’s true, then what’s the sum of my reward? Is happiness just a reflection or a lasting memory? Is it an aggregate thought of realized goals? And then, do those aggregate thoughts turn into aggregate conversations, where we inject ourselves with vicarious happiness? More so, how do you figure out what your goals should be, where to start, or who to invite for dinner? That etiquette book went out of print decades ago.

What is it about life, about people in general, that makes it so difficult to find yourself, or even just to fit in? Are we all so different? Am I the only person that finds it difficult to relate with people that appear to want the same things out of life and for themselves as I do? Or is it that struggle to find yourself that puts such a gaping ravine between us all? Does it ever get smaller, easier to scale? Yeah sure, happiness is an individualized blueprint. But even so, we all live in the same material, concrete world. Are we really that different? We all grew up with the same trends, the same notions and norms, the same media hype. Could it be that our non-conformist attitude in the pursuit to finding ourselves is really just a smoke-and-mirrors act to conform? Do groups of friends or close families truly enjoy one another, or is it just a comfort knowing you’re not alone? Do we secretly think to ourselves, “Hey, if those people are tolerable, what’s the harm in keeping them in my back pocket”? Don’t we all just use one another to escape reality and revel in that elusive moment of happiness anyway? If we didn’t, then what would be the point? People don’t befriend others who make them unhappy.

So the million dollar questionâÂ?¦”What is my purposeâÂ?¦why me?” Do I have a chair on the Youth Board contributing to a degenerative society? Am I predestined for a white-collar wardrobe, or a white-collar wash load? Do I really have to go to exhaustive lengths to succeed, make a difference, or make myself happy in this competitive mess? Why can’t things really, just be simple? What if I don’t want to keep up with the Jones’ or maintain a competitive edge in a competitive market? Will I cease to exist? Will I be one of the human specimens that go extinct? I just want to knowâÂ?¦what is this all for?

Copyright (c) July 2006 Lindsey Borzelli. All rights reserved.