Reading harold_maude's journal

In the movie "The runaway bride" there is a conversation between Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in which he asks her, "how do you like your eggs?"

The reference being of course was that she defined who she was by the man who was in her life.
Outside of that, she had no idea who she was or what she wanted.

In life there comes points to which we loose all defintion of who we are, what direction we are going and the question of "is this all there is" generally tends to come up somewhere in the mix.
When a person gets close to or somewhere in their 20's it's often refered to as figuring out what you want to do with your life.
When a person hits their 40's it's refered to as a midlife crisis.

But I tend to think it can happen at any age. Somthing bigger than the ordered world you live in and are surounded by comes along and smashes it all to peices and your left standing there not knowing how to deal with it.
And nothing makes sense, and there is nothing but questions that you can't escape from.

Life crisises. Those wonderful moments when you get to find out how you really like your eggs, or even if you like them at all.
It's easy to and very normal I think to want to try to flood the space with stuff. It's far too painful to look square in the eye and say "ok" to.

Thoes who are fortunate enough to not be able to flood their life with stuff and have to deal with every unrulely emotion that pokes and prods us get to find out tons of stuff about themselves.
What is real, what's crap and what is important.

It doesn't feel like a good thing at the time. In fact outside of a few events that cause a life crisis to occur, it hurts deeper than you can stand most of the time.
Sometimes it feels like life is over and there is no point in going on.

But if a person can get into the mindset that it's ok, and not only ok, but important, then you can survive it.

If you think about it, everything is suddenly moved out of the way and you get to find out about you.
That's something alot of people try to figure out alot of time while their busy doing things that they think will answer that question.

The truth that I've found out it that the only way to get the answer is to not try to fill the space with crap or deversions, but face it, feel it, and find out about you.
The pain is going to be there. And the confusion will pass, and what you have a choice about changing you get the opportuntiy to make the choice whether or not to change.

If you can see it that way, than it's ain't so bad. You get a fresh start in a sense. And get new socks and maybe new shoes too, so to speak.

I'm pretty sure when people go off and do what seems totally nuts to those who love them, that's what's happening.
Their taking their sabatical from "the way things are suppose to be" and going to a place where all the nets are gone, and doing battle with everything inside them.

They may or may not come back. If they do, people tend to say, "you've changed" which is translated, "I'm pissed at you because you were part of my comfort zone and when you left you fucked my world up."

Granted it's not always that way, but it's part of it.

Crisis forces change. Life forces change. It's not static.
Even if we go our whole lifes and there are few life crisises that come, when thoes we love die or leave it happens. It happens, and there is not alot we can do about it.

Except maybe embrace it, and let it do what it's designed to do, help us figure out how we like our eggs.

It only looks that way because your standing on your head.