There are seriously very few adults in the world today. Those few that remain are dying off at an alarming pace. Replacing them are 70-year-old children, and to follow are those who are now 60-year-old children, 50-year-old children, 40-year-old children, 30-year-old children, and so on.
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My life right now is littered with debris of all kinds—physical, mental, emotional.
A long-term project of debris-clearing is needed, but it feels almost insurmountable. There is just so much of it, everywhere I look. I keep arranging it and stacking it and trying to form piles and putting it into bins and so on…but it’s all just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic as they say.
© Aron Hsiao / 2007
It is underneath all of this debris of various kinds that the real things, and real living, can be found.
But clearing it all away is an undertaking that has to be worked in around the realities of everyday life.
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At some point, you reach an age and level of experience at which you are pretty confident that you can do just about anything in your corner of the business world.
That youthful worry about your competence and the nervousness that someone might be looking over your shoulder and evaluating your performance—those things are gone. Now you know you can do it all, and do it well.
The problem then becomes one of prioritization. Instead of being blinded by your insecurity, you are now torn amongst reasonable options all the time, having to make decisions that never seem perfect, but always seem like compromises, then just getting on with it.
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In fact, and sadly, that’s pretty much life. Having to make decisions that never seem perfect, but always seem like compromises. And then just getting on with it.
One of the most unjust things about reality is that there isn’t any time to really acknowledge or celebrate the meanings of things. And even if there was, you couldn’t do it, because such attempts simply don’t work.
Honors never are. Appreciations never do. They always fall short, seem hollow. Because as valuable as meaningful things are, they are meaningful in-themselves.
Any attempt at pausing to value them after the fact is a pointless waste.
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My STBX always hated high English culture. I always loved it, largely because they undertand this, and they aren’t maudlin. Real emotion is deep and silent and solitary, utterly unshareable. At least that’s how I experience it.
I’ve been watching a bit of British television on the weekends again. I think my two favorite characters of all time, in any genre, come from British crime drama: Inspector Endeavour Morse and Detective Sergeant James Hathaway.
Realizing that they are merely fictional characters, seen in necessarily limited settings and character arcs, and that they appear in the form in which I know them on that most pedestrian of mediums, I nonetheless find very much in them to admire.