Swooned by Janine’s anguish.
I finally took that guitar out of my trunk.
Turns out learning chords is easy; the hard part is going from one to the next, then back to the first.
You can only truly learn for about 30 minutes at a time. Your fingertips get coarse. This is where the calluses creep in.
This is what it must feel like to learn to tie your shoes. Or maybe learn to drive. Or maybe learn to make love.
Give it time, give it reps.
I just finished reading Camus’ “The Adulterous Wife” the other day in a cigar lounge walking distance from my home. When the words came to an end, I sat there, swooning at Janine’s anguish, struggle, and resentment — tinged by its subtle relatedness — as Latin Jazz blared softly over the sun’s rays pouring in.
Janine needed to feel needed.
She got what she wanted; however, her bond with her husband was purely transactional. No, not in the dollar sense, but rather in the longing to be seen as essential to one another.
She’s married. Not in love. But she’s married.
What was wanted was found: being needed!
Yet, she looks outward to catch the gaze of others, escaping into the cold Arab midnight air, running toward a North Star she just hasn’t been able to put into words.
Through the monotony of her days and the incompleteness of her nights, Janine is missing fulfillment.
Which is why I feel the need to write this.
Because to feel needed isn’t any different from the feeling that comes with what we’ve learned to buy or seek out.
It’s when we get that car or vacation or girl — once you have it, or have enough of it — that the idea of “there’s got to be more to it all” creeps in.
As was the case for Janine after years of marriage.
To break this feeling of monotony and incompleteness, we seek out more and more — or at least, something different.
Or, so what 27 — soon to be 28 — years of living have shown me.
I do think the feeling we’re after — fulfillment — is rooted in art, creating, beauty, and the spiritual.
How often do we hear the trope of a single person having a kid and saying the kid has become their whole world and purpose?
Creating a child, the beauty of raising them, and the macaroni art they’re soon to create.
And some art, in some fashion, is what would probably make you feel fulfilled.
Or so I think,
George
