Nattering with K
Last night I had a cup of tea with my friend K (which is always a nice thing to do) and she and I were thinking about whether its better to be the sort of person who takes themselves and their experiences very seriously, or the sort of person who doesn’t.
By people-who-take-themselves-and-their-lives-seriously, we meant the sorts of people who talk about relationships in terms of having met (or not having met) ‘the one’, people who reflect on their lives with statements about ‘crucial turning points’ in their careers and people who describe moments at which they found and recognised their ‘true calling’ .
And by people-who-don’t-take-themselves-and-their-lives-seriously, we meant people who add things like ‘but who knows if it will last’ to discussions about their love-lives and work and who think of even their most exciting passions as potentially fleeting and faddish and best not made too much of.
We both thought of ourselves as being more in the second category (even though we are both very passionate about all the different things we do). There’s a sense in which its the more open category, as it leaves you open to changes of mind and the nuances of reality and all sorts of other things that make life very interesting. Plus it is nice not to have people always saying, ‘Gosh you take yourself seriously’.
But maybe it is also a bit cowardly?
Maybe there is a lot to be gained by taking yourself and your life and all its different events and components very seriously indeed. Frida Kahlo (who I like) said of her tram crash and her lover, ‘There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.’
I can hardly say how much I admire her for making that impossible judgment so deliberately, decisively and seriously.
