Still Sundays
January 20, 2012.
This Sunday evening stillness feels like tin cans rattling and trailing behind a car taking off into the sunset.
I didn’t realize how much effort and time my Sundays’ essays took until recently, today, when my thoughts are stronger than the muscles that push me into a source beyond them. I am able to write today because yesterday was filled with ease and joy. So stillness begets stillness.
Three successive articles in the New York Times reported on the state of relationships. “That Loving Feeling Takes a Lot of Work”, “The Hoax of Digital Life”, and an all time favorite for all those who know this phenomenon, “Modern Lessons From Arranged Marriages.”
This is a quote from the second one: “The Internet is the cause of much of today’s commitment-free, surface-only living; it’s also the explanation for why someone could tumble head-over-heels for a pixelated cipher. Online dating was only the start of what led us down this road. […] To fall in love requires a bit of unpredictable human interaction. […] How can you get dumped when you were never really involved?”
Why want something real when it is so much work as one commentator put it?
Well, because, fake is boring, tiring, and not life-affirming. Life demands work and work doesn’t have to mean suffering.
This is what the Wizard, as I call him, had to say about the first one:
I actually think it has less to do with any of that and more about the difference between wanting good feelings to plug out painful leaks versus genuinely wanting a partner, which I’m not sure most of us fully understand until we are older. A relationship isn’t a salve for pain – in some ways it’s an invitation to it. At first it can feel like torture as the layers get stripped away and we become more of ourselves, but there is a deep bliss waiting for us. Conversely, a connection that provides just an emotional or physical high is more like eating a candy bar or drinking very strong coffee. It isn’t real love or desire, though it may be its deformed stepsister.
What a wizard my wizard.
The third article offered no lessons. I come from a culture where arranged marriages are quite common. Arranged does not mean forced per se. I am not sure when or how this connection between the two words was developed but it is not correct.
All I have to say about that is when two people make a commitment to something beyond just their coming together—for some that is children, for another it is culture, for another it might be families, for another it might be a commitment to the very institution of marriage itself regardless of the role of religion—it is inevitable they will do what it takes to “make it work”. And this “making it work” varies from couple to couple.
Yes, the divorce rate might be a lot lower in arranged marriages but the rate of affairs or dysfunctions within a marriage is no less. Moreover, the involvement of families varies from couple to couple in arranged marriage situations.
Here is a simple rule: you have to make your own rules despite traditions and cultures and preferences.
My father often says that nothing strips our cardboard personalities like love with a commitment.
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It is January 20th, 2013 and I am discovering the work of Katsuhiro Otomo for the first time. I am not embarrassed. I am a firm believer we discover certain works at just the precise moment to assist us in developing new ways of remembering The Before.
Otomo is a Japanese manga artist, screenwriter and director. He is most well known for the comic series titled Akira. Despite google’s optimum privacy detonating soldiers there is not much personal information available about Otomo, with the exception of two articles and one short interview. Nonetheless, I got what I needed. In Otomo’s own words, the series Akira began with a “Why not?” and then “it became something else.”
Just because I am not familiar with Otomo doesn’t mean I am not familiar with Japanese animation.
I grew up watching Captain Tsubasa by Yōichi Takahashi translated as Captain Majid in the middle of nowhere desert town where I grew up…the stars were my only bandwagon. I didn’t know the words anime or manga, or where Japan was on the map. There weren’t any people in the community other than my brother who watched this “serious cartoon,” as we called it, on the one channel that was available.
I never knew Takahashi was the creator until today. Thank you, Google. But what has knowing the name offered? There is hardly any information available about Takahashi and even if there was what would I gain? Those anime series served as aromatic oil for the soreness for some constant yearning. What does an eight-year-old want from a story? The same thing an eighty-year-old wants. I am not bold enough to assert further. Not yet. I will find out.
Certainty, why do you always leave me behind?
We are living in a period where people pay homage to those who inspire via their own creativity and call it something new. But such periods have existed before and will continue to exist.
You have to create without knowing the reach of the arrow that doesn’t kill but saves.
Why not?
It’s been a still Sunday. I am grateful.
