TomKat

So, TomKat are finally married. And not a moment too soon. I was getting a little bit too tired of hearing about the reports of the 'wedding of the year' and the 'most romantic event of the season.' A couple of decades ago, a twice-divorced man with two children marrying a young girl almost half his age whom he has been living with and who is the mother of his third child, in an unrecognizable religion might have been called a scandal. Now it's being ballyhooed as a 'celebration of love.'

It's not TomKat (That's Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, by the way) per se that bothers me so much. They are, after all, entitled to live their own lives. It's the fact that we aren't even surprised anymore. Have we really come this far? Have we really turned ourselves into a society where everything is acceptable? Where individualism and self-expression are so prized that we are so ready to flout the sanctity of marriage and to scoff at conservatism?

Or maybe it's not society. Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's not society's tolerance that increased but my tolerance decreased. For I suddenly find myself unwilling to compromise on core beliefs and principles. People-I have learned to accept more. I have struggled to be compassionate and less judgmental. And for the most part I think I've been improving. But as for issues and controversies, I no longer find myself hedging sides. I'm way in the line. So far back, in fact, that I sometimes find myself in the company of the 'unpopular' and the old. It no longer bothers me if I am sometimes called old-fashioned or traditional or cautious.

Maybe, this is what it means to become old. Maybe this is what it means to grow up. Maybe the turbulent times of adolescence and early adulthood culminate in this stage of knowing who I am and how far I'm willing to go. Maybe the teenage struggle for identity and independence eventually metamorphoses in the need for conformity and orthodoxy.

Or maybe it's because I've become so tired of statements like 'I feel' or 'What I think is right' or 'Because I want.' There's only so much of the I that I can take. Thinking and being an I all the time can be exhausting and confusing. I can no longer stand living in a relativistic world. I want certainties. I want to know what is Good. What is True. What is Right. I want fewer areas in my life to become gray and more to become black and white. I want to live my life making choices not based on what I can do but on what I ought to do.

Or maybe my 'quarter-life-crisis' is finally starting to resolve itself. Perhaps, I have found who I am in the world and what I need to do. And now I can finally go about the business of becoming the person I was meant to become and everything else is merely a distraction.

Who would have thought that TomKat could actually lead me into such a deep analysis of myself? Maybe what TomKat did for my quarterlife crisis, Brangelina will do for my midlife crisis. I can only hope.