Love is a moment in time. Moments pass, sadly. Love is a fading commodity due to a rapidly changing environment. Love has always required focus, this world, today ...there is a trillion more things to focus on than ever before in history. Our focus is shared with the most ridiculous and trivial of things that, unfortunately, Love can not be sustained in the manner it requires.
My philosophies on this topic run very very deeply. My belief is that the past 3 generations have been 'singled out' in history as test subjects in some manner by some unknown force ...a test to see how much data we are able to process, a test to see if we can survive change occurring so rapidly that nothing is the same from day to day ...including love.
You see ...it's my humble opinion that two people fall in love and from the very first moment we spend time apart we begin to grow apart. We don't try to grow apart. No one realizes nor gives grace to anyone for the amount of information we are each required to handle daily. Think of it carefully. Lets just pick 100 years as a reference. 100 years ago there was virtually no new information to mentally process on a daily basis. 500 years ago, even less. 2000 years ago less still, and so on. For millions of years on the evolutionary scale humans were born, mated young (13?), bearing kids, zero to almost no travel during a life, knew only the area and the people around them, almost to the point that the rest of the world did not exist, worked alongside their life partner and therefore perhaps spent 95% of physical time together, grew together, learned together, suffered together, and ....had virtually no outside stress to speak of which required any thought, any focus, any change in our basic character of who we were ...and then; We died at a young age in comparison to today!
Today is so different. I realize that sounds almost so obvious it's not worth mentioning but have you ever considered the enormity of HOW different things are? We no longer spend 95% of our time with our life partner, it may be as little as 5% due to work etc. We are not only travelling to distant places without our partner, we are also watching and learning about the rest of the world constantly. The changes, due to information intake, which occur in each of us so rapidly are affecting the ability to maintain long term relationships of any kind.
Data. It's simply the amount of data that is 'forced' upon us. Consider a person 1000 years ago travelling to a friends house for a visit ...there were no billboards, no street signs, no stores to pass, no satellite radio to choose from. Now consider even 100 years ago a person who ran out of butter (so simple yet so immensely important). My grandmother, born in 1908, when her family ran out of butter they did one of 2 things ...made more or went to perhaps one location that offered it for sale. That's it. That little thought was required to replace the butter. Now ...today, we run out of butter and guess what? Upon entering the average grocery store in North America we are face with approximately 47,000 pieces of data to process ...in a hundred years, one tiny little thing has taken us from 2 to 47,000 ...and that only includes the products on the shelf, not the vehicle you drove or the alarm you set or the traffic or the people or what you were going to wear ...does this make sense yet?
I realize that speaking of purchasing butter may seem ridiculous but it's my opinion that these trivial things are having a huge impact and no one is giving anyone grace for feeling stress over ALL that is required to be processed daily. Add up all the things we are required to deal with and compare it to 100 years ago ...don't overlook anything, not gasoline, new car purchases, renewing a mortgage, travel for work and pleasure ...not even butter.
In my mind I see a historical timeline like this:
x----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We are the x at the front of the timeline ...
For millions of years virtually nothing changed in requirement to process data. We are the x. All at once we were forced to consume millions of bits of information every single day. With zero opportunity to get used to this new world ...we were a species taken from one environment and dropped into a new one. No species, when taken from their environment, can adapt rapidly to change so enormous, yet ...everyone assumes we should all be handling things better than we are. Our species is threatened by the reality of rapid (understatement) progress. Zero time to evolve into the needed survival modes required to adjust to the new environment. With no time to evolve ...any species will fail, perhaps even become extinct. Heavy.
Maintaining what we knew in history as a 'relationship' is virtually impossible, not because we don't want to, not because we aren't trying ...damn it, we are the generation who was given the task of transitioning from 'simple, basic, familiar and hardly unchanged over time' to 'holy crap ...how do I handle a billion bits of information and stay sane ...'.
As I said my philosophies on this matter run very very deeply. My philosophies are just that ...not science, not fact, just my own interpretation of information as I have come to know it. This interpretation has made me who I am in a lot of ways. I don't judge. No one can understand what anyone else is going through ...hell, we don't even have a chance to understand what we ourselves are going through. I refuse to condemn anyone for what appears to be 'bad choices' in this lifetime because I see the bigger picture of ALL we have to deal with. I don't hate. There is no time. I don't regret, it's nonconstructive to say the least. I limit the amount of data I take in ...I don't watch television unless it's beyond important that I see what's on. I refuse to pick up trash magazines and add countless bits of data to my already overworked mind ...I focus on the things that matter. People I care about, things that bring me contentment, quiet moments to reflect on what is important enough to spend sacred and limited time on.
My life is no more complex, easy, wonderful or horrible than anyone else's. We are all suffering due to the challenges of being thrust into an environment so drastically different than any before that our ancestors had to deal with that we don't even have the time to stop ...and offer grace to those around us who truly just need a tiny bit. Understanding that overwhelming amounts of data create stress unlike ever before in history, just acknowledging that it's really quite unfair, all we have to deal with, offering support instead of condemnation when one close to us is suffering ...grace. Please give yourselves some grace, and once you do, please try really hard to give it to all others you come in contact with in this lifetime. It's not easy to maintain a standpoint which allows you to simply accept everyone for their apparent failings. To understand that your 'life partner' will begin to grow away from you as you will from them instantly, not out of choice, out of a need to survive in an environment that none of us have had the chance to become accustomed to.
Sigh ...
Sorry, my reply turned into a small novel. Not what I intended.
BunnyHugs
JessicaPRabbit
