well, I have now finished a year in switzerland and I am back living in the UK - and since I am a student once more, this now means that I am living at home with my parents - and all of a sudden, my attitude and mentality have completely changed - it was only 3 weeks ago that I was a fully fledged adult, and I pledged to my parents that I was now an adult, not a child anymore, and I will therefore end up acting like one - after all, this is something that I had actually become accustomed to in the last year - but now my independence seems to have been revoked, and I have dipped back into childhood manner - no longer wanting to do work, or basically do anything my parents ask of me - I have been home a week and haven't done one of the 30 jobs that has been assigned to me to do (though to be fair, I have another 14 in which to get them done) - and I am even backing up this laziness by suggesting that I have plenty of time to get them done, nothing to worry about!
But the issue I think is this - there is only two things that have changed, the first being which country I am living in, and the second being at home with my parents. The first is unlikely to have that much of an affect - I am not so changed by the residents of the country that I live in that my entire personality is going to change - after all, I was feeling incredibly lazy in France, where I had a 2 week holiday before fionally returning to the UK - but I think there is something about being independent that allows you not just to have a mind of your own, but a body of your own as well - the only things you need to do is what you actually need to do - which for me, is my pending dissertation outline, due in when I return to uni - but that cannot realistically be started till I have completed my interviews, which will be the primary foundation of the aforementioned essay.
I think now I am back in the UK, living back with my parents, that I realise how important independance is, at least, how important it is for me - perhaps you only realise how much you need something when it is taken away from you - living in a country seperate from my parents gave me such a freedom, that I will only enjoy when I return to university.
But perhaps there is a problem on my account as well - I never had the typical "teenage rebellion phase", so I suppose that is what I have ended up with now (just a little bit later than normal) - In self reflection, to keep up my end of the bargain of acting like an adult, I should rise above this self pity and laziness, get off my backside and do some work. Maybe being at home with my parents has just gotten me lazy, because it is too easy to fall back into being a child again and let the laziness take over.
moral of the story? not really this time - perhaps it is that the blame is not always on the other person, or that laziness is not a virtue, or that independence is a good thing and helps to mature oneself - take from it what you will - even if it is just the reading of my musings that you find amusing.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Monday, July 6, 2009
Love and Romance
Romance is dead - or at least, close to it - perhaps it is still lived out in the older generations, and there are a few of us true romantics still around - but I am here to be slightly facetious. For what it is worth, Romance is dead amonst the mass of the population, and here is why. Love is a very complex thing, and I do not think that we, as a generation, have understood it properly. Because I believe that true love and true romance is to be found, and only the other day did I work out what it means to love someone (because, to be bluntly honest, I was trying to think what would characterize the perfect woman for me - so I know what to look out for. You've all done it, admit it (perfect man if you are of a female gender...) - and that the deepest love that you would ever have for someone develops from them having a unique quality, or set of qualities, that you adore in them, but are rare to find. And I stress this last point because this I think is key.
I worry about a lot of my friends, because I see them fall in and out of relationships like the phases of the moon. and I do not believe that this is healthy for them because they are getting into the "relationships" for the wrong reasons - either the desire to simply be in a relationship - I know I suffer from that a bit, perhaps it is therefore a blessing that no girl has ever found me attractive enough to want to date me - or that they feel insecure, or that they are infatuated with a person without actually knowing the real person behind.
Unfortunately this is where experience of what it is like to be in a relationship is needed, to then go on to explain why it is unhealthy - but I believe it causes a lot of emotional trauma and distress, and you gain a false view of what love really is.
So back to my original definition - when you find a unique quality in someone, a quality that you completely adore. Why have we moved away from this? Is it because of the move into becoming like sheep who all follow each other, that these days I struggle to tell two people apart because society has turned people into clones? perhaps. I will leave that up to you to decide, but the reason I think my definition is important (it is not necessarily everything that is involved, relationships are complicated after all), is because it reduces the feeling of the need to cheat, to divorce and to seperate. Because the reason this quality or set of qualities has to be rare, unique, something that you would not find in somebody else (or are unlikely to find in anyone else close by), is precisiely that, that nobody else is like them - and that because you adore those things about them, once you have them and enter a relationship with that person, you will not want to live without them. This begins the partnership that is to eventually become a marriage - that two people who cannot live without each other and become devoted to one another, work as a team and as one - when, as the bible says, the two become one flesh.
This is how it is with Christians and God - when Christians have found God, we fall in love with him - not just because he loves us, but he offers something that Nothing can ever replace - with a woman, you could argue that somewhere around the world that there may be someone like her or similar to her - but God offers unending grace and unending love, but above all, there is nothing else that exists, nothing that we can do, nor can anyone else do, to remove our sins from us, other than Jesus Christ. Why does God love us? it is difficult to say - what have we to offer the almighty, that he has no source for anywhere else? Perhaps it is that we have the possibility of being saved - nothing that any angel would ever experience - and maybe that is the quality God adores in us the most - that we can have salvation through him. (Though, I am of course merely speculating, we shall never know the full truth till we are in heaven)
I worry about a lot of my friends, because I see them fall in and out of relationships like the phases of the moon. and I do not believe that this is healthy for them because they are getting into the "relationships" for the wrong reasons - either the desire to simply be in a relationship - I know I suffer from that a bit, perhaps it is therefore a blessing that no girl has ever found me attractive enough to want to date me - or that they feel insecure, or that they are infatuated with a person without actually knowing the real person behind.
Unfortunately this is where experience of what it is like to be in a relationship is needed, to then go on to explain why it is unhealthy - but I believe it causes a lot of emotional trauma and distress, and you gain a false view of what love really is.
So back to my original definition - when you find a unique quality in someone, a quality that you completely adore. Why have we moved away from this? Is it because of the move into becoming like sheep who all follow each other, that these days I struggle to tell two people apart because society has turned people into clones? perhaps. I will leave that up to you to decide, but the reason I think my definition is important (it is not necessarily everything that is involved, relationships are complicated after all), is because it reduces the feeling of the need to cheat, to divorce and to seperate. Because the reason this quality or set of qualities has to be rare, unique, something that you would not find in somebody else (or are unlikely to find in anyone else close by), is precisiely that, that nobody else is like them - and that because you adore those things about them, once you have them and enter a relationship with that person, you will not want to live without them. This begins the partnership that is to eventually become a marriage - that two people who cannot live without each other and become devoted to one another, work as a team and as one - when, as the bible says, the two become one flesh.
This is how it is with Christians and God - when Christians have found God, we fall in love with him - not just because he loves us, but he offers something that Nothing can ever replace - with a woman, you could argue that somewhere around the world that there may be someone like her or similar to her - but God offers unending grace and unending love, but above all, there is nothing else that exists, nothing that we can do, nor can anyone else do, to remove our sins from us, other than Jesus Christ. Why does God love us? it is difficult to say - what have we to offer the almighty, that he has no source for anywhere else? Perhaps it is that we have the possibility of being saved - nothing that any angel would ever experience - and maybe that is the quality God adores in us the most - that we can have salvation through him. (Though, I am of course merely speculating, we shall never know the full truth till we are in heaven)
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