I think life consists of basically three stages: acceptance, rejection, and creation. As a child you accept every idea that's told to you because you have no reason to suspect otherwise. As a teenager you find out some of them weren't true and begin to reject ideas. As an adult you create them yourself, or possibly return to those first ideas and accept them on your own terms.
Well at least that's what I think should happen. But a lot of people never seem to make it past that first stage of accepting on faith everything that's poured into them (they're permanent children), and others never get past defining themselves in terms of ideas that they oppose (they're permanent teenagers).
I'm still in stage two I guess, but I'm starting to outgrow it. On my trip to Vienna I realized that I can't define myself as an antithesis--that I must be a thesis of my own. And recently I've started to see that a lot of what I do--pleasure-seeking stuff, craziness--is basically self-destructiveness, and to engage in it further with this knowledge would be to actively oppose my own existence.
Posted by Alan at January 13, 2003 07:41 PM