Imagine a choice between two life paths. They are different, and they diverge from one another, but they are also complementary, and they are paths that we all follow in one way or another.
The first —you are given a process, and you are given a responsibility, and the outcome that emerges as they collide is pure satisfaction. The only catch? You are alone on this path. The second — you have this same path in front of you, but the process and the responsibility don’t ever fully merge, so there is never any pure satisfaction — no escape from dissatisfaction. Instead, what you have are other people in your life to share that dissatisfaction with, and that dissatisfaction eventually becomes infused with a deep sense of meaning that your life would otherwise lack.
In most relationships between people, especially romantic ones, if the individuals share a lot their time and space with each other, they begin to merge their selves, and that’s another extreme. Rather than placing their own path as the top priority, they rely on another to fill a void that they have left open. This removes a lot of the aloneness that is inherent in any individual journey, and it can and does create meaning, but it neglects the fact that there are an increasing number of problems still unaddressed, which sooner or later overpower and destroy whatever meaning is shared.
The balance, then, must lie somewhere in-between: to pursue what you must pursue for yourself first and foremost, accepting that it is only you who can do that, and then, as you progress, share bits and pieces of this with others so you can combine one whole and another whole into something greater, something a little more complete, realizing and acknowledging that it will still always remain somewhat incomplete
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