«Keep it simple!» — advisers teach every now and then. You can understand them: the simpler you are, the more convenient it is for them. You can respond to these calls, or you can allow yourself to be complex and get multi-layered, multi-layered and multi-component pleasure from life.
After 40, I began to take care of my skin and go to the sea only in the evenings. This summer, already in the dark striped swimsuit, I saw thousands of luminous crustaceans in the surf. One of them caught on my ring and glowed for a while after the wave receded. It was beautiful. The sea shimmered. I called my daughter, together we admired the glow and this moment, and both remembered it …
«I’m not sad, I’m complicated,» Dr. House said, «girls love it.» And it is true. But at the same time, complex (especially complex women) are confused with sad, gloomy and, even worse, unhappy. “How difficult everything is for you!” — they say in an accusing tone and consider this a disadvantage.
What’s wrong with being difficult? After all, this means that you have many reasons to get confused (deepen, understand), but there are also many ways to have fun. And it will be a luxurious, multi-storey, sophisticated pleasure. Even if it’s beer with sprats. Because complex ones have more receptors, associations, flavor enhancers. They have sharper feelings and more voluminous reactions. And so they need less to be happy. They are so complex that they can enjoy simple things. They alone can.
If you are complex, then with age the world becomes more and more multidimensional for you, it opens up like a tea leaf in boiling water
You know, good perfumes, when you sniff them on a piece of paper, smell differently than on the body, behind the ear, not like on the wrist, and in the evening — not like in the morning. Lighter in the morning, stronger in the evening. And in my world, every person and every object seems to be sprinkled with such spirits. Everything in it moves, everything changes shape and meaning, depth and color, and the further, the more intense. This is called growing up and maturity, in my opinion.
I have a friend who is 12 years older. When I was thirty and she was forty-two, she once pushed the keyboard away, stretched in a chair, crunched her bones and exhaled: “We have so many more highs ahead of us.” Then I did not find reasons for optimism at the age of forty. But now she is 55, and it is impossible not to admit that there really were a lot of highs and the same is expected. Because if you are complex, then with age the world becomes more and more multidimensional for you, it opens up like a tea leaf in boiling water. It’s like sex: teenagers have quantity, adults have quality. Teenagers have cheap cigarettes and sand in their shorts, adults have whiskey and an orthopedic mattress. And this is the natural course of things.
Growing up means acquiring many successful ways to come to terms with yourself and life.
Growing up doesn’t mean having a shoe collection and building a new wardrobe. It’s not a lot of new things, it’s a lot of new passionate interests and sensations. And many successful ways to come to terms with yourself and life and enjoy it all.
And experience, you can’t get it anywhere. He’s piling up. And it also gives volume to perception, gives a 3D effect to everything. You have already tried a lot of things, you have preferences, attachments — in colors, smells, tactile sensations, fabrics for upholstery of chairs …
Yes, it matters to you. If the upholstery is, say, a brown synthetic carpet, not ice, of course, but you will survive — that’s what an adult is for. But if light linen — you can be happy already from this. You can sit in the hotel lobby, wait for someone, look at your hand on the armrest and the weaving of threads in the fabric and rejoice.
And so it is in everything: in food and alcohol, in cities, their architecture (look what a staircase!), places, affairs and routes, weather and nature, cinema and music, communication and friendship — in what is important, but on what to close your eyes in a person … Selected from the multitude — their buzz and favorite tastes. And all this does not weigh you down, but makes it easier.
Another thing, if none of this happened. Somewhere something broke and didn’t happen. And you don’t have a deep inner resource — large and small attachments, loves, sympathies, joys, flavors of life… Financial opportunities can strengthen all this, but they cannot replace it.
And if there is very little about what you can say: “Oh, how I love it! I just love it.» That is, you can say — love does not work. But it seems like you have to be happy sometimes, and you look into yourself and ask: “What do I love most in life? Who do I want to see right now? To make me so happy now that right — wow! And in response, silence. And you can still scrape with a spoon on a copper saucepan of desires, but to no avail. And that’s when it starts: “Where’s my heel moisturizer? Why is tea cold, champagne warm? And the ice cubes in the glass are the wrong shape.
But if everything is grown-up — in life you have more of what you like. Including your quirks and oddities, grains of sand and cracks that you discovered a long time ago, with which you got used to and which also adorn life every day. The beauty is that you have already forgiven yourself for the oddities and with everyone you have a history of relationships: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — and all this is behind you. You love them in yourself and you know that they make you different from everyone else. I made sure of it.
Maturity and complexity is when you know how to lick your wounds, powder your scars, or wear them proudly, like orders.
And also your mistakes, which were either true mistakes, or true love, which is always right. But adulthood, maturity and complexity is when you know how to lick your wounds, powder your scars, or wear them proudly, like orders. And less often to feel loneliness, and if you feel it, then do not be afraid of it.
How strange it is to listen to calls for simplicity, “simple” human joys, unpretentiousness of comforts, sprinkling ashes on one’s head — yes, they say, I need more conditions for happiness, more accessories, and cheap port wine and “Friend” cigarettes are not enough for me to have fun. Longing for teenage promiscuity, recklessness and despair in everything — it sometimes pops up. But when you know and love so many different things, you love in such detail, you bite with such gusto, you do not regret that you are not 20 years old. And how you spent hours lying on the beach, not being afraid to get burned, and burned yourself to a complete change of skin, you remember without sweet nostalgia.
As one very successful air conditioner salesman says: when you have found your place in the sun, your choice is to stay in the shade. There is an abyss of interesting things and a long list of series that still need to be watched.