I always found reading Vox Popoli more interesting for its underlying premises than the direct message. Both are usually well presented in an obvious and at times “controversial” manner, which is why Vox is an interesting and well-read writer even by people who may disagree strongly with him.
Today’s post was no exception, and it gave me pause to reflect a little on my own life. Something I don’t do very often. I may refer to examples from my life on this blog, but generally I do that mostly as a way to give at least anecdotal proof of whatever I am discussing.
Generally though, I am too busy running to the next mountain ridge or life-battle to stop for very long and take stock of broader aspects of my past. I know them, I lived through them, and I am not very prone to melancholy or regret, thank God. Nevertheless, once in a while, it is good to do.
Perhaps it was also due to a brief conversation with my wife last night. She said something to the effect of “How fast and hard life has been with us.”
And it’s true. We have known each other a long time, some 18 years, and been together nearly 8, but in that time we have done and gone through so much that it feels as if we were together a lifetime already. In a good way, mind you, but it’s definitely a lot. Moving through life at the speed I do is not for the faint of heart, and she certainly is probably the only woman on the planet not only able to do it, but come through it better for it instead of completely worn out.
Neither of us is young anymore and sadly we don’t have a “nest egg” either. I don’t even have a pension, so I’ll be working till I drop. I don’t mind really as long as I can get to a point of balance where we are self-sufficient regardless of what the world throws out at us. We’d be there already if it was just the two of us, but then… what point would such an existence have? The thought of it alone fills me with dread. Our children exasperate us, wear us out, and are relentless little savages that would have been equally at home in ancient Rome or Sparta, and of course they like to eat daily, and despite their propensity for running barefoot everywhere, apparently also require regular clothing and other basics. They certainly make life a bit more tiring, but, by God we love them so, and a life without them would be a complete horror when I compare the two.
And we both had the other version too. Before we got together we had both travelled extensively and lived on our own terms mostly. When we did get together, we didn’t have much time to keep doing that together, because she’s basically been pregnant most of the time. But the little we did was excellent. She is a very fun (if somewhat chaotic) travel companion. Her spontaneity is a joy to watch. We’d been together only three months when on a holiday in Venice she walked us into a jeweller’s shop, an old style, very Venetian, traditional type of place, “just to browse” and we left with our order of wedding bands. So yes, she definitely matches me in both the speed and intensity, but more importantly, she matches me in what most outsiders would assume is an unlikely aspect we share: a sense of self-dignity that is increasingly rare in the world.
Men tend to refer to it as “honour” but it’s nothing to do with the external world. It’s something we have internally that prevents us from making choices or taking on offers that so not align with who we are.
We both had offers throughout our lives that involved a (much) easier life, wealth, and even fame, and we each, independently of each other turned them down for that one reason. You can’t buy our souls. It sounds cliché but the word soul really is the one I think fits best. It is not related to the outside world or what it may look like to others or a need to be “cool”. It’s just an internal thing, that relates to the most fundamental part of who you are, and the action you take or refuse is based in retaining that aspect of yourself unpolluted by the world, regardless of any witnesses to it at all. And in fact, mostly, we made our choices in silence and without complaint.
At the end of his post, Vox wrote:
Kate Moss once famously said that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. In like manner, there is no success or fame that feels as satisfying as freedom and self-respect.
And it made me sit a minute and review my life regarding this. It’s not as if I had any doubts about it, as I said, the regrets in my life are few to nil. I’d have to dig hard to find some, and then, when I look at it, the things I may have regretted I could not have acted meaningfully differently at the time with the knowledge I had.
Which is not to say I don’t think I made mistakes. I made many and big ones too, but regret is a different kind of thing to my mind. It’s the difference between a man who has his leg blown off, gets a prothesis and carries on with his life, a little limpier in his gait, and one who daily regrets and broods over it and feels sorry for himself.
My wife and I both grasp this. Earlier in the week I told her:
“Imagine if we’d got together when we first found each other (the attraction was there from the start as I have explained before), we’d have 15 kids by now. Okay… maybe only ten or so, but still…”
She looked at me sweetly and verbalised in stark but not unkind words what we both knew:
“It would never have worked dear. You’d be dead and I’d be in jail. (Pause) Or the other way round.”
I laughed with her, then we were silent for a bit before I added:
“It’s funny… because it’s true!”
She smiled sweetly and nodded meaningfully.
And it’s a part of us too, that uncompromising sense of self. You change and so you change what and how you may react to as you get older, but the uncompromising part remains uncompromising, even if the specifics may change, the constant remains that you will not do anything that is sensed by your core as “selling out” who you are.
For both a man and a woman to have that as hard and unmovable and as deep as we do, and remain together, is… unlikely at best, and rarer than dodo-teeth in my experience.
I think too, that our utter hurricane of the last eight years or so, despite it being rough in practical terms, has been extremely useful, because it’s akin to war. If there are bullets whizzing by overhead, danger and risk at every turn, and no safety net, you soon find out both what you are made of, as well as what the people around you are made of. And when the war scenario ends, you know at a very deep level what the guy who charged trenches next to you is like; and all the superficiality of what keeps the pretence of civilisation among humans going, are like a costume you may both wear in public for the sake of the same said veneer of normalcy that prevents us from living in the irradiated wastelands of the post-apocalypse, but even so, with a glance across the ball-room of the theatre of life, we know. That we are who we really are, in both the good and the horrible, and that the other knows it too.
Between men, that is a rare friendship and one that the heroic and timeless stories of humanity make epic poems about, like the Illiad.
Between a man and a woman, it is what inspires us to reckless acts of foolishness, danger, and madness. But also… what fuels every love song, creation of art that has a sublime beauty, and inspires well… arguably… epic poems like the Illiad.
That retention of your own sense of self, that deep and abiding absolute self knowledge, is what truly makes life worth living and reaching your deathbed, immediate or far-away as it may be, without fear. No amount of wealth or fame or “glory” can compare to it.
Neither I nor my wife regret at all turning down large sums of money, superficially attractive offers of widespread fame, or innumerable indecent proposals. Whatever indecent things we did, we chose ourselves and usually for free and the curiosity of the (unwise) exploration.
Ultimately, as I said in both my book on Systema and Caveman Theory, and as the oracle at Delphi has stated timelessly, the first and most important thing you should really know, is yourself.
