Hello friends. It’s interesting how the term “settling” got all contorted to mean “discontent” or “given up” or something like that. Wouldn’t it be nice to dream of the opposite: sitting still to expand one’s home, one’s home found in you, something like that.
Still, it’s unavoidable to use the word with the other nuance. Like how easy it is to settle by subsisting off of online squabbles.
When would you consider a home complete? Perhaps that’s the hidden design: it won’t ever be complete against the currents of time. Children grow, families grow apart, friends find themselves in strange places. The cul-de-sac’s endgame is overgrown weeds and cracked asphalt.
One could force it all otherwise – one could gather all the best minds, make the best salons, know the pop culture and large Christmas neighborhood parties to dress up. But walking through these suburban collections so it seems vines are waiting to sprout. One can imagine the front door ajar for the McMansions all abandoned, Christmas tree discarded at the end of the driveway for long overdue garbage pickup.
If one is always having to fidget between taking the best of the home you have today, and wondering if there’s something more you need to work toward, well, maybe you get neither in the end. Even if you manage a picture-perfect village’d family will you be able to perceive it as perfect after all the fighting to get there? Maybe one instead fixates on how to enact the proper festive schedules for the superlative home – attending HOA meetings to ensure everything proceeds smoothly.
Passing you right by in the process.
So how do you learn to appreciate the home you have, and should you ever balance that with some seeking? The question is: to what extent does settling become “settling”? When does it acquire that dejectedness?
When you do decide you want to expand your life, perhaps to include more friends, it’s hard to say when the search ends. It’s hard to say it even begins depending on the movements of your day.
Furrowed away and avoiding phone calls, neighbor greetings or simple outings: surely this isn’t the ideal way to go about it. Sure could be another way, though keeping it too close means more pieces to pick up after it all ends. Introducing oneself sure then introduces new cast members – even if you don’t want any more drama but a slice-of-life. Maybe not.
But it does seem like the right way to go about it. Whoever comes and goes, however the day unfolds – whatever careers or fixations to dwindle – may as well embrace it as it comes. To settle perpetually. Relish in it, despite however disgruntled others may fare in the same position.
Because it doesn’t really seem like you have a choice in the matter anyway. The forces which drive us all results in our interactions.
Long ago when gathering friends for a Minecraft modded server beginning – distributing mod packs, installations, directing them through %AppData% shenanigans – so the entourage proceeded.
It lasted for a good couple of weeks.
That is, until one gets bored and another one too.
Until there’s only two or so left to keep pushing along the endlessness.
But it inevitably shut down.
It’s the same with anything else. Like trying to make a video game with others – the outcome is already determined before you even write the first line of code. It’s determined by the personality makeups, aspirations and inclinations of whoever you’re with. It’s determined by their schedule, their whole life reality essence which reveals itself however the joint venture turns out.
So, in the same way, those who do stay in your life, well, that’s already determined. How can you settle in something you didn’t really have much of a choice in? Especially as everyone moves away, seeking their greater home, avoiding that plague of settling. You can try to fight out upstream – perhaps book a flight across the country – though you bring yourself with you, and your interactions won’t change that much. Serendipity falters against the rigidities by which our societies chug along – coffee dates are what you’ll come to love.
For some, it’s far too easy to settle into a “nothingness” indeed and look longingly toward anything else but this. But no matter how much you’ll insist and recruit, cultivate a forum, a comfortable group chat and bi-monthly outings – more often than not this falls apart due to those inevitable circumstances.
There’s no point trying to run against the current.
It’s up to you to fill that “nothingness” in with all things you’d want a full life of. The things within your power. Because as long as you try to gather anything more than what’s within your power – that is, some knowledge, habits and solitary inclinations – then you’ll get caught up in some “settling” indeed: settling with a “self” that doesn’t know how to enjoy the homes right in front of them.