Thursday 20 May 1999

OK, this does it. I am now officially growing old. Let me explain: I've mentioned the tradition of "russ", the peculiar traditions connected to leaving (usually) high school or its equivalent, around the age of 18 or so. Due to their special bright red or blue uniforms, these youth are easy to spot in the city, even when they're not doing something stupid (which they often are, as tradition requires). This year, for the first time, I was struck by how young the females looked. Bordering on childish, in many cases. I pondered this: Young people mature physically (or at least sexually) quite early in our days. So I supposed it must be I who was finally growing older.

Today as I waited for the buss, I saw a girl, not as old as those others by far. There was something odd about her, but at first I could not place it. She talked like a child, she acted like a child, she looked like a child ... until suddenly I noticed that she had breasts. Fairly large and well-defined ones too. And suddenly everything fell into place. The reason why those 18 year old girls faces had looked so young. It was because I actually saw them. For the first time since the summer I was 13...

So this is how old age feels. Better check my pensions plan and my prostata.

As the very controversial New Age author James Redfield used to say: Trust synchronicity!. (It sounds more scientific than "trust in God", though the difference is not always clear.) Case in point: While I was hung out to dry by my old aquaintances on rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan for claiming that I could and should hold different viewpoints at the same time, suddenly Al Schroeder delivers a convincing defense for virtually the same view in his Nova Notes, more spesifically Contradictions inc. -Of course his viewpoints differ from mine in some ways, but the principle is still the same. Just because you believe in something, you don't need to close your mind to everything else in a wide radius. You don't need to fit into one of those ready-made boxes. You don't need to wear a label. And best of all, you don't need to not understand.

A long time friend of me had the habit of saying, when she heard about some crime or other disgusting action: "I can't understand..." She could not understand why anyone would do such a thing. Whereas I could not avoid understanding. Nor would I want to. You think you can come so easily to innocence? Just close your eyes and there it is? It's too late for that, far too late. That's what my religion (Christianity) says in its convoluted and metaphor-ridden way: The innocence of ignorance is lost forever. The only way to innocence now is knowing good and evil, and choose good over evil. And even that isn't something we manage to do without stumbling. And yet, I believe it is better to stumble than to stand still. I may be wrong, but that's how it looks from inside this pair of eyes.

Luckily I can understand the saint as well as the sinner, or it would probably have been a dreadful life. Like a heavy depression or some such.