Why write, if I have nothing to write about? Is a life not worth writing about, a life well lived?

In my latest Goethe reading, he writes to a friend that ‘all the people in Marienbad face the same foolish endeavor of trying to synthesize thesis and antithesis’, which was strange, I always thought about Goethe as the transcending type. After consulting the matter with Claude, I understand Goethe is transcending through embracing the polarity, and experiences duality as he does color:

Light and darkness, brightness and obscurity, or if a more general expression is preferred, light and its absence, are necessary to the production of color… Color itself is a degree of darkness.

To Goethe, synthesizing is going murky gray. Only embracing polarity as a lived experience will produce color.

But then, at the end of the book, after he falls in love with a 19 year old woman, he writes to his friend that he attempted synthesis, undoing his own words and admitting to his mistake. Still, seen from a distance, he traversed polarity and embraced love and heartbreak in full. His synthesis is all-encompassing, not a mild lukewarm middle ground.

These thoughts accompanied while simmering over the infatuation I had with Jara recently. I feel strong impulses both to keep myself single and independent, as well as an undeniable yearning for a loving and caring relationship. It’s impossible not to make concessions in relationships, and that’s partly why I broke up with V: I started to feel like an unyielding prick. The Goethian way of handling this would be to accept and live each polarity in full, to embrace solitude when I have it, and to embrace relationship when it’s worth it.

Written the next day after the previous paragraph:

Yesterday at yoga, the young woman who was in front of me said after practice “why is there a puddle of water?” and I sheepishly admitted to sweating copious amounts. “Oh wow! I thought you had knocked a bottle over or something” she said. I was looking for a subtle expression of disgust but I perceived none of that, it was amazement and after that we bantered jockingly.

I went to the dressing room and when I came downstairs she was there with her friend and the teacher. The teacher said that in the next retreat his boyfriend would give a salsa lesson and I responded enthusiastically. My new acquaintance said out loud “Oh wow so you also dance” she said with a mischievous smile. I said not yet, but I’ve been wanting to learn for some time. She asked me my name and I said Mark, then I asked for her name and her friends.

It was only after I left the studio that I realized she had been flirting with me. I don’t regret how things happened and there’s the possibility of me interpreting friendliness as flirting, but ultimately the scenario is useful to perceive what I want. There’s the mature and attractive woman who is sexually assertive but not relationship material. There’s the mature and attractive woman who is smart and kind, relationship material. Then there’s the young and attractive woman who is… my mind auto-completes “naive and adventurous” but I don’t know her. She is short-term relationship material, assuming I’d even have a chance (some people just flirt as a way of being).

As I spell out my fantasy options, I notice the order of preference goes from long term to fling.

Some days ago I want to my boss-friend’s home in the country side. A friend of his was visiting, a recently divorced man of 50 years of age. He said he had great success on a dating app called “Raya”. I asked what “great success” meant: dates with 15 women in the past year, sex with almost all of them. The man was perhaps above average in desire-ability when compared to his cohort.

I felt both cringe and envy, to tell the truth. Envy at the copious amount of sex with different partners, cringe at what he had to distort and conceal to get there (lying about his age and intentions). He sent me an invitation to Raya which is invite-only.

The invite has been sitting in my inbox for some days. After some debate with myself, I’ll pass. I currently experience the emotional world as a three-way pull between flings, a relationship, and solitude. I’ll simply discard flings as something I should pursue, but allow them to happen when circumstances are correct (as if I had this problem in the last few years!).

Yesterday I signed up for the gym again. I set up the squat rack and did my first barbell squats in years. Just 60Kg was grueling, but I also see a very different approach to lifting weights. Where in the past I would have held my breath and try to power through the whole series almost in full apnea, this time I went both up and down very slowly, pausing at the bottom, really feeling the squeeze of the muscles involved at each stage of the descent/ascent.