Enlightened Struggle

I sit here slightly torn between reality and a dream. My dreams have always lead me to believe that it was possible to escape the long-term commitment to a permanent job and a permanent spouse. It is abundantly clear that most of the people I know now seek to shore up the necessary career and social resources to settle down into a stable and viable lifestyle.

Doing this dance in the dark, I cannot quite perceive of where I'm headed. I have just parted ways with my lover, and my views on the future have turned dangerously cynical. I am compelled to accept economic and biological necessity, which means that monogamy and a gainful job are the best long term prospects for success. However, it seems like everyone is caught up in a rat race to add points to their resumes (both of romantic and employment ventures). Is every relationship just a stepping stone to the next one? Must every job simply prepare us for that dream job sometime down the road?

All too often, I hear people talk about relationships as if they were, more than anything else, useful tools to life-advancement. I guess our society is constructed upon certain foundations, namely predictability and personal stability. And, I suppose, for example, that after a healthy, loving relationhip with Layla Tomarchio, Billy Bob Berezovsky is competent enough to carry on the same sort of rapport with Zoe Ataturkey. Human relationships are indeed about comeptency and acquired skills and functional patterns. And, in this same vein, our employment futures link us up with workplaces where our interests, professional capabilities, cultural affinities, and psychological proclivities mesh with the structures already in place. Judging by both the highlights and difficulties of the relationship that I've just been experiencing, I suppose I am all the more primed for the next sort of rapport, should I seek one out. It's supremely important to even out the so-called expectations gap (thanks, Dobson) in order to figure out what can reasonably be demanded of one's partner or job.

So, I retain a lingering suspicion of the settled life and all the rigors of being confined to this "whipped" existence. Even though I've just participated in an enthralling and entirely satisfying intimacy that is ongoing, I harbor fears that I will merely reap the benefits of this relationship to become more enlightened about myself and my needs and then progress teleologically onto the next one. I'm all about enjoying life's ride, right, but I resist the temptation to construct an organized, linear, and methodical journey towards something gradually bigger and better. My issues with commitment are manifold and surely have as much to do with my ability to trust myself as with my willingness to trust someone else.

In some ways, it seems that I desire to map things out so that there is little room for spontaneity. Yet, in most things, I have attempted to preserve a sense of quotidian unpredictability in my struggle. While spontaneous adventures are thoroughly appealing to observers and the observed, they do not lend themselves to the dimensions of civilized, bourgeois existence circa 2006. In this new year, shall I let my reality of being loved be forsaken because it's not practical? When I think about my life and the notion of progress, I fear that I'm perennially getting caught up in trying to move on, move up, and get my piece of the pie.

With this feeling of broken numbness, I'm trying to force myself into redemption. I've just been intensely involved in a relationship with a very insecure future. Perhaps this type of relationship is so natural for me precisely because it's so unpredictable and because there is no definitive end in sight. Continuing on this path of open-ended relations with the second sex guided by dubious long-term strategies, I feel bogged down by emptiness. This struggle catapaults me hyperbolically towards a reality characteristically a mystery yet convincingly some higher form of optimal excitability.

Goodbye sweet thang...