hunter and gatherer

I admit it: I watched 'Sex and the City'--by myself. I don't have the excuse that a girl dragged me into a chick flick. It was my own doing, and I'm not even that gay. Here's what I saw:

We are a silly species. Rational decision makers? What are you talking about? No, we are nuts and obviously we have found sophisticated ways to enjoy that fact. Oh, this is just a stupid movie! Really? Sure, it's over the top, but you and I have met people who have made similar choices as the characters in Sex and the City. Damned, even I have married people while I should have followed my gut feeling and canceled the wedding on the wedding day, regardless of consequences and implications. Millions of people have watched this stuff season after season because too much of it rings painfully-enjoyably true.

Four girls move to NYC to find love, and twenty years later that dream hasn't materialized as intended. What a surprise! Some of them may have found what goes by the name of 'love' but, as you know, we get bored with what we have and we want more. Love won't do and we want marriage, a baby, or a $50,000 ring. Once we get that we are upset because it didn't show up "the right way." Remember Christmas gifts of your childhood: by mid January most of them had begun to collect dust.

Now, had these girls found love in the first episode of the first season, you wouldn't have seen hundreds or thousands of designer dresses--some cute, others so aggressively hideous that I wonder if women are too proud or too insecure to get their guys' opinion on their outfits before they attack the public. Even the cute ones aren't cute for everybody but a lot of girls apparently don't care or worse: lack taste. Selling haute couture was doubtlessly important to produce the series and the movie. But there is something else preventing these four girlfriends from finding love:

We don't want to find love!

We want to "pursue" it. The quest has more value to us than finding love and the impossibility of having to live with it. The pursuit of happiness is your inalienable right, as the Declaration of Independence states so prominently, NOT happiness itself. Same with love. The pursuit of love is so much fun. Once we believe we found the damn thing, we treat it and the other person in the most crappy ways. The person who loves us may be worth less to us than "the way he gave me that ring." Or a marriage becomes more important than the girl or guy we pretend to love. Love looks like a great idea for individuals who don't have it. The pursuit of love is cool. Once accomplished, the pursuit of something else is cooler. What we can't have has a higher value than the contents of our pocket. People are interesting until we "have" them ... or until we discover we never will. After that moment EVERYTHING changes! We resent people for succumbing to us, and we resent them for never giving in. There are exceptions but not many.

We live for the tension of hope, the electrical charge in the "becoming" phase, when we don't know if or when or how. We are junkies. Deep down in the core of our spines, we are hunters and gatherers. Some of us believe we evolve, learn, or spiral up to higher spheres of consciousness and higher vibrations. That's fine, but you better realize it's just another form of the same pursuit and no more sacred than hunting quail or carving another notch in the butt of your pistol. We learn how to operate cars and computers, but to this day we haven't figured out how to "operate" children and for sure we don't have the slightest idea how to be ourselves. Wow yeah, we sure have learned a lot! Throughout the millennia, we remain hunters and gatherers, and we are pretty good at it. Only problem is we think we should be somebody else.

There are parallels between the pursuit of love and our pursuit of money.

We are afraid to get there because dreams end with accomplishment. You know plenty of stories about lottery winners who literally destroyed themselves within a few years after being cursed with a jackpot. They discovered they were the same useless fools after than they were before, and self-destruction kicked in. Money in large quantities just makes obvious who we are. It takes away the mystery we treasure. Money works like a looking glass, making clear--painfully so at times--and public what we are made of. Money makes good people visible and it makes idiots visible. A great number of people hesitate making huge chunks of money, because they are scared to remove all doubt. We want the pursuit but spare us the sobering experience of end results.

The dumb thing is we don't admit how much we enjoy the pursuit. We claim we hate our jobs, and we would be willing to leave our despised jobs if we got the big pile of dough. Nonsense! We love the work we complain about and we love it MORE than anything else, including quick riches. That's why we work where we work. Duh.

We love the hunting and gathering part (of money, goals, husbands, one-night stands, diamond rings), and we do well to stand up for it. Not getting there is not a problem! Naturally there are challenges during any hunt, but they and exactly the stuff we hate are what turns an otherwise instant collapse of our dreams into a drawn out hunt. Reaching a goal "collapses dreams?" Yep. Poof, and the precious tension, driving force and your energy source, is gone. By definition, lots of the stuff you acquire become worthless in the instance of success.

Should you stop pursuing goals, money, love? Of course not! But you could do the same and enjoy the happiness OF the pursuit. Eventually getting what you were after will not take away from the happiness you already have. The stuff you want will then fall into the hands of someone who is worthy: You!

Egbert Sukop