the older I get, the more I understand, viscerally, the closeness of my relationship to chimpanzees and nebulae alike. to my mind, both seem to have a more functional relationship with chaos and control than do we sapiens: while we pretend the latter to deny the former, i'd suppose they accept the former, doing away with the need for the latter. i know, it's not so comfortable a notion that, having no control, but that's only because of how much we do like to pretend. and what has any of this to do with age? it's a matter of perspective. as a child, the world of adults seemed like some kind of well-orchastared symphony, or at least a play with plausible stage notes. to take part in such a thing surely required some kind of secret understanding that only maturation could bring. you know where the story goes form here.

the older i get, the more i stay the same. i've figured out a few things, i hope, but if i have, one of them must be that the world is predicated on our willingness (urgency?) to pretend at control. adults, being those people over 18 or so, make the decisions in our world, yes, but i've realized now that the sureness and ultimate understanding that i'd hoped lay behind such undertakings is nothing more than consensual mythology, pretend. i must be an adult now, since it's only a matter of counting years to make such a determination, but no magic wand waved, and i'm still just muddling through. what's more, the more people i meet, the more i come to see that we all are. when you get down to it, we probably aren't all that much more capable than our 7 year old selves were. we're just more practiced at pretending.