In light of this, I am in love with an amazing person he has provided a lot of grounding in my life and yet I fantasize about us driving clear out of range and out from under the expectations of others. As we drove away we would be blasting our favorite music singing like we had the lungs of a harbor porpoise (one of the greatest lung capacities of any animal). Anyway, we would be free to grow and expand beyond the limits of our present environment.
In regards to this, Mandery brought something to my attention today, the main character of the novel Ralph has been told by his love that she quit law school and wants to go to Tibet to teach English, she wants him to leave his "responsibilities" and go with her, see the world, cultivate love and live for happiness. A feeling of anxiousness overtakes him and he begins to question its cause. Through the couple's dialogue Mandery provides us some of his delectable anecdotal thoughts on day-to-day existence:
What really caused the knot in his stomach was that he would never be able to bring himself to do this thing he really wanted to do.
Ralph was, in this respect, like anyone who does something he knows to be bad for himself -- like falling in with a married person or sticking a Q-tip into one's ear to get wax out knowing it will just make matter worse. More accurately, he was like someone who fails to do something he knows is good for himself -- like going to the gym that evening instead of watching television or keeping an appointment with chiropodist to have a bunion filed down. Or traveling somewhere exotic with someone you love.
Ralph sipped some Broth
" I'm not sure," he said. "I have a sense of responsibility. I have duties. Maybe that will be different someday."
The truth was, though, Ralph didn't understand his own reluctance.
"I don't think that will ever be different," Jessica said as she considered his words. "It never gets easier -- there is only more and more duty."
Ralph nodded.
"Why can't you live like you said you would on the night we first met? Live for the moment. Not just that day, but everyday."
Ralph returned his last wonton to the bowl.
"I don't know, " he said, and that was the complete truth.
This dialogue stood out to me because since I started cleansing the toxic clutter from my mind, I feel like I've been having a similar dialogue with myself. It is not necessarily that we do things which are bad for us, but that we don't do things which are good for us. What is stopping our good from going to work? Quite obviously someone may say our ego is to blame which in turn it is actually our fear or our lack of finding a truth other than, I don't know. And if I don't know is really our truth than we need to break through our fear of the unknown to do what good for us.
