(Currently reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being.)
The way it gets harder for peoples’ lives to fit together the older they get. Kundera’s metaphor is a musical composition, but others could be used as well, I suppose. The point is that when we are young and growing so quickly, the people we grow up with share a history with us, they know a lot of those shared meanings because our meanings of things were formed together. Older people, especially those who think they have figured a few things out in life (woe to the person who thinks he/she has figured anything out in life), are no longer as malleable, they are set, and thus less flexible to fit into another’s life, or to allow another’s to fit into theirs. Something which has so much meaning for us, something that played such a big part in shaping who we are, means nothing to that other person (for they were not there, and cannot possibly understand it with the power and import that we did and do), and even though it is not their fault, we still hold it against them in a way, do we not? Such is life.
But, I wonder, is such mutual understanding impossible or just unlikely to happen? I do not, of course, know the answer to this, but I still have hope in the latter, for it allows for possibility.
One important issue that I think needs mention here concerning these meanings we gather/construct over time which make up the musical composition of our lives (Kundera’s metaphor) is that the process of awakening and awareness is the questioning of the illusions of our conditioned existences. This means that we take our compositions of illusions and we question them, we awaken to the way things really are, and as such, we divest ourselves of these illusions.
I think that rather than trying to fit these compositions together somehow—a doomed process I think, at least when it comes to real happiness—the way for people to truly connect is in the divestiture of their illusions. Success in a relationship is not dependent upon the number of similar illusions two people cling to, but rather on how well they divest themselves of their illusions, allowing them to live reality, to live the love they are in the absence of their illusory ego-self. This is a complete 180 from the way we are conditioned to think about relationships.
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From my personal notes, 10/26/99.
