It sometimes seems to me that a lot of people are desperate to conform to what is already here and known as being “the right way”. Why do women want to join the clergy; why do gay people want to get married? Why do people constantly want to join institutions that intrinsically reject them, instead of shrugging their shoulders and forging their own, completely different, ways ahead? I wonder if people really think about these conformities, or if they’re simply knee-jerk reactions to the humiliation and upset of being rejected.
I ask all this because, at thirty-six, I still haven’t learned to drive. I also never learned to ride a bicycle. I haven’t bought a house and have no real plans to do so. I tried marriage, but it didn’t work out for me. I don’t want to have children, which is nothing to do with “focusing on my career” because I don’t really consider that I have one in particular; just a job that pays the bills while I concentrate on other, also largely meaningless, things like painting, writing and learning complicated languages I won’t use.
If you’ll excuse the proclamations here, I don’t tend to
shout about these things, or indeed discuss them very often. But they are markers of being
ever-so-slightly different; things
I’m aware of especially when asked for the reason I don’t drive, or don’t want
children or don’t really care about having a “permanent roof over your head”.
The answer is that in the main, these aspects of life just don’t interest
me enough. But lately I’ve been asking
myself; am I just trying to rebel against conformity in my own silly little
way? Or just carry on drifting through
life without really committing to anything? Perhaps it’s a combination of both; I must
admit that if I were to take my driving test again and pass (after six fails in
between the years 1995 – 2004 when I did half-heartedly attempt it) there would
be a tiny part of me that would feel disappointment at having done something so
normal; something people would tell me, with a natural note of smugness, would vastly
improve my independence.
During the course of my separation and impending divorce
I’ve been reading a lot of Stoic philosophy, which has only concreted my “don’t
commit to anything in case it doesn’t work out” stance. It seems silly, applying Stoic philosophy to
something like a driving test, but that’s just it – everything is so transient,
including driving licences and houses, that it’s hard for me to dredge up a lot
of interest in them. Eventually I won’t
be around any more and there’ll be no need for that driving licence, and
somebody else will buy and live in my house.
So it’s easy to think “what’s the point?” about everything.
No comments:
Post a Comment