The Intensity of Care
Remember how important the most trivial things were as a kid? The friendships that burned so brightly at 13, 14; most of them we probably haven’t spoken to in 20 years, if at all. The hobbies that seemed like life; beating the video game at the expense of doing homework, watching cartoons because they were a fun distraction, reading because the book’s big fantasy world was so much more interesting than the small real world around us.
As we grew, those things began to seem silly in context. But there was a point in our 20s, as the vast expanse of adulthood stretched to the horizon and we could still look back into our childhood, where we understood that the childish things of 1 Corinthians 13:11 weren’t the video games, the books, the friendships, but the way we approached them.
As with many parts of a power dynamic, the sentiment our parents conveyed - do your homework, grades are important! Stop wasting your time on those silly video games! - wasn’t completely wrong, but the perspective they’d forgotten they acquired and which the child could not see, was that it wasn’t the game itself, it was only the prioritization of the wrong things.
The adult world is full of rules: if you don’t do your work on time, there are consequences. If you don’t file your taxes on time, there are consequences. If you get caught speeding, there are consequences. To adults, homework is the tax, and you’d better make the IRS happy and then you can goof off for the other 10 months of the year.
Adults also contradict themselves: “This is the best time of your life” they said, “You should enjoy it while it lasts!” but then expect you to stop playing video games and do your homework.
Looking back, the job of a parent is to provide a box, a container into which reality slowly leaks as the child grows and gains the capacity to interface with it. I understand that some people - probably more than we realize - do not have this experience of parents/caregivers, which is a separate conversation beyond this particular musing but I did want to hold space for that as an aside.
I’m sure this creation of a fantasy environment generates a ton of nostalgia, and probably, a little bit of jealousy on the part of the parent.
Having all the agency of an adult often brings with it more problems than it solves. Adult money (in theory) buys adult toys (hey now) but with scarcely the time to use them. If social media makes fun of a grown man for taking a few days off work to play a new video game, forget them, but it only writes the point in a larger font: the best you can hope for as an adult is a few days of make-believe away from responsibility, which you’ll probably get made fun of for taking.
Childhood should - and again, I know not everyone has this experience - be the opposite. Life is a fantasy into which the real world intrudes. Do your homework on a Friday, sit in a tree for 8 hours reading comics on a Saturday. Can you do that as an adult? Maybe, but the difference is what you return to. As a child, you return to the same state that you left: homework is done, school starts Monday. As an adult, you return to: dishes need doing, laundry needs done, bathrooms need cleaning, accounts need reconciling, 3 missed phone calls at least one of which is important, groceries that need getting, that thing you gave up doing on Friday afternoon that you really need ready for work on Monday morning, and any other dozen things that materially impact your continued function in the world.
Of course, there are things as a kid that feel world-ending, and as mentioned previously, those experiences are real within that context, but ultimately the end result is disappointment. Those same experiences as an adult end with late fees, utility disconnection, and other serious consequences. Adults have so many serious things to care about.
And yet, it is the adult world that’s backwards.
Sure, all of those adult things are necessary, but they’re not important. If you were writing your own eulogy, if the best things you could think to put were “They were a good person, they paid all their bills on time” then it would be a pretty bleak eulogy. We’d want to say that they lived a life of great adventure hiking in the rugged outdoors, were friends to many beloved animals, were the kind of friend that was always there for those they loved, that they lived life with feeling and found time to enjoy themselves. That while they didn’t change the world, they made the world around them better not worse, and that those who knew them are poorer by their loss.
Much like nobody thinks you’re cool because you got your homework done on time, nobody’s going to write a sparkling eulogy about you because you always paid your bills on time.
Stepping back one layer, breaking the fourth wall if you will, I’m aware this piece is written from a very externalized point of view. One could read into it a sense of pleasing everyone else, as if the conclusion to draw is something like “live the way that’s going to impress the most people.”
I think that conclusion would be a shame.
If you’ve never read the Litany Against Fear, I think it’s such a short piece that really hammers home the point that we’re all observers, even of ourselves:
“And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
It’s more in this context that I write this piece. As we’re observing the passage of our own life, I think it’s important to realize that existing and living are two different things.
The mechanics of modern society creates ghosts of important things. And when we turn the inner eye to see its path, in this case I want us to think about existing instead of fear. Where the existing has gone there will be nothing; only living will remain.