Exploring where life and story meet!

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Of wanderers and vagrants

Stranger, pilgrim, sojourner, wanderer, gypsy, and vagrant, all perfect words to describe how I'm starting to feel in this modern world.  Tolkien famously penned, 'not all who wander are lost,' and while I've always been enchanted by the phrase, I begin to understand and appreciate it more and more.  It is from his 'Lord of the Rings' books and refers to Aragorn, or Strider as he is ignominiously known, the uncrowned King who has spent his entire life living as an exile and gypsy in his own Kingdom.  I just don't 'get' modern culture, I never have.  I'll happily lose myself in an old book, but get strangely bored with anything written much after 1935.  Television and movies rarely hold my interest, and I travel in very tight circles on the inter web.  Is it me that's boring or has the whole world become dull?

I suppose boring is not the correct phrase, mundane would be far more appropriate and as it stems from the latin for 'world' it neatly answers my question as well.  The preferred pleasures of the modern world really hold little interest for me and I find myself an alien in my own country, whose people cannot discuss anything deeper than pop culture, a language I do not speak.  The virtues have become passive rather than active: the modern good is not to cheat on a math test versus once it meant helping an old lady with her grocery bags.  Or worse, character has come to mean 'are the opinions I hold socially acceptable,' i.e.: do you recycle, eat organic, or practice/agree with whatever the current conscientious fad is.  The highest 'good' is my own pleasure rather than the welfare of others.  We are all of us becoming conformists to a strange and ever changing list of high social ideals, at which the merest hint of dissent is greeted with cries of outrage and vitriol.  We are not allowed to think or reason or discuss, but must merely conform.  And it is incredibly dull.

So we obsess over the lives of fictional characters because our own have no 'flair.'  A hang nail becomes a crisis of international proportions when appropriately worded on social media.  Life's a party we are told but everyone is a stranger and no one is quite sure what we're celebrating, or why.  We now have so many 'celebratory moments' that none of them are really special.  How many times does a modern kid 'graduate' from preschool, kindergarten…before they actually graduate from high school?  Do we really need another party to find out if your baby is a boy or a girl, odds are pretty good it is one or the other.  Does anybody else feel like they woke up one morning in one of those weird parallel life movies: it is your life but it isn't?  It feels sort of like Disneyland: smile, even if you don't feel like it or you're fired.  Yeah, those fake smiles really boost the spirits, don't they?  We're all 'happy' on the outside but miserable on the inside, but if we keep busy enough no one will notice.

Everyone is looking for authenticity, the 'real thing,' all natural, back to basics, you get the idea, but when every box of inedible prepackaged frosting-injected spongecake and all those parts of the chicken that they won't even put into dog food but will happily convert into dinosaur shaped breaded patties for juvenile human consumption bear the label, 'all natural,' you really start to wonder what exactly that means.  Every city I visit is exactly the same, it doesn't matter what state or climate we're in, they all have the exact same mishmash of stores, restaurants, and entertainment venues.  Every house is beige and every car is a too small, eco-friendly whatever.

I tend to visit a certain mommy blog on occasion, just to see what the 'cultural norm' is for parenting nowadays, and had I not already had kids, I don't think I'd have any.  Apparently there are only 2 kinds of parents in the world: those who live vicariously through their kids and 'it is the end of the world if Jeffie writes his C's backwards at 2, how is he ever going to get into Harvard!' parents or the 'it was sort of an accident or I thought they'd be cute or something' parents who can do nothing but complain about how much kids mess up their lives: 'I can't even go to the bar when I want to!'  Both of these examples are just an extension of our larger cultural problem: we are looking for fulfillment and purpose and meaning in all the wrong places.  And sadly, we are blind to it.  We just try something else: kids didn't work, how about a dog or an affair or a trip to Paris or a new car or…  Like a hamster on an exercise wheel, we just keep running and running but never truly get anywhere but tell ourselves we are making excellent time.

That was me, until the wheel broke down.  I had the degree, the professional career, true we were living in a shoe box, driving a used car trying to pay off school debt, but we had 'the life,' or so society assured us.  And I was miserable, only I didn't know it.  Then life fell apart, the job went away, 'the life' vanished like the dream it was, and I couldn't be happier for it.  My family still thinks I'm nuts, but I know their lives are as pointless and tedious as they assume mine to be.  Sure, I don't have a fancy title anymore, I get called 'mommy' or 'sweetie' instead of 'doctor,' but I like it that way.  The paycheck was nice, but it sure didn't make life any better once the bills were paid.  I just read a short article on the cost of kids, which basically made it sound like a lose-lose deal financially and career wise whether you stay at home or work, so you might as well not have them.  From the materialist's perspective that makes a whole lot of sense, but there is so much more to life than money or prestige or power, which is why those who put their hope in such things are never happy or content.

What then is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?  It isn't 42.  It's love.  I'm not talking the trashy romance novel or steamy paranormal teen romance or even the modern chick flick sort of infatuation we mistake for love.  I'm talking the 'willing to give up everything for the benefit of the beloved' type of love, I believe the greeks called it agape.  It isn't what you have but Whose you are.  Nothing in this world can compare to that which lurks beyond it, that Love that snuck into our own reality and gave up everything so we could share in that 'peace that passes understanding,' in that Joy beyond the world's comprehension.  This world isn't enough, but then it was never meant to be.




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