Belongings

Belonging has a way of sending us into a tail-spin that no other sense or effect on who we are has than anything I’ve been thinking about lately. I’ve often wondered about that. Why its bark is equal in all parts to its bite. Why, it [belonging] has the capacity to alienate us from reality in much the same way that loneliness can and does.

When I wonder about ‘belonging’ I often wonder why it’s so important and I realise that it goes to knowing and feeling we have a place and significance in the overall scheme of things, of life as it is known to us. And I realised too that such ‘belonging’ from time to time can sometimes be so completely unknown to us even if we do think we know where or with whom it might be.

I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘belonging’ is a dynamic aspect of our state of being. It’s always changing depending on those choices we make along the way and how we establish its value for us in life’s diverse economies. That dynamic is as different at age 14 as it is at age 24 or 44 or 54.

Belonging is important at 14 because we desperately want to fit in with, or be liked by our peers. By the time we get to 24, we can take the peer thing or leave it, we are spreading our wings developmentally speaking and forming our own more solid boundaries.

At 44, well, the sense-shaped belonging ideal inside our thinking is open for tweaking and analysis – our own. I’m a little ways up the garden path from there but it rings true for me that observation.

I’d like to think that by the time I celebrate being 54 years old I’ll know that ‘belonging’ is a state rather than a place. It’s the internal hammock slung between two trees and where my own comfortability about where and how I am at this point in my life has that restful calm like a summer’s day in the Bay. Happy days!