At various, usually demanding, points in life it’s hard to take things seriously. And yet you recognise that understanding how you reached that point is a serious matter. You see the paradox that is not giving a toss, yet you’re wanting to understand why it is that you don’t. So you sit there in tremulous balance, Scylla and Charybdis-like, wondering what it is you truly care about and questioning if it really matters. You consider the people, the things, the seasons, the strangers who’s lives are surely more interesting than yours, your pets and favourite books, whether 90% cocoa chocolate is tastier than 85% and if so is it 5% tastier or more. At the same time you wonder why it is that you don’t take any of what’s going on seriously, why you really don’t care. It’s not an all the time thing, it’s a point-in-your-life thing but it’s limiting and debilitating and it gets in the way of contentment and happiness.

This taking things seriously paradox can hit at any time, so don’t think it’s about getting old because it isn’t. Apart from anything else remember that the old only get old if they give up on life or allow life to give up on them. This is separate from what happens to the body, you understand. The body’s constantly deteriorating and all that we do is about slowing or avoiding that deterioration and eventual collapse. The body’s always going to be letting you down one way or another: it’s not the body it’s the mind that makes you old. We all know people in their twenties who’ve the mindset of a 55 year old. 

Not taking things seriously when you ought to hits at any time, from childhood through the approach of life’s end. Maybe at that point not taking things seriously is handy, but before then it’s far more of a hindrance. It gets in the way of committment. For example, when your parents let you down because they separate and leave you alone to deal with what’s happened by yourself, you really should take it seriously. You’re told to just get on with it, so in a state of confusion and distress you do. But you can only do so by telling yourself this massive change isn’t serious, not really. Change now is not relevant because the future is just a flicker of a moment someone once told you about. Things will get back to normal soon because this isn’t serious, it’s temporary.

But when childhood trauma hits, it can’t be understood or effectively processed without someone explaining it. If no one bothers to explain it that surely means it doesn’t matter. Whether or not you should, you trust the world around you, so if it mattered someone would tell you. If no-one explains anything then whatever’s going on doesn’t matter at all. What’s happening is deeply shocking and is having a serious affect on your life, but you can’t see it. It isn’t really there. But this is not temporary.

And then there’s the time a person comes into your life who takes you very seriously indeed, but you really don’t understand why. Maybe you should take them seriously but you don’t. Instead you idly ponder their obsession. Is it desire and sex? Is it some fear of being alone they have? Is it their need to nest, to settle down and build a new, family-centric life? When you think about these things, horrified at how close and tight they’re erecting the railings, you can’t believe someone would want to be so intensely serious. Not now, not with so much left to explore. But the idle pondering leads nowhere, and the answers to the questions are uninteresting. Attempts to make you be serious are really not serious, they are trivial, gossamer, someone else’s gig and they don’t involve you. Yet they do. When you wonder about the why of this, you have no answer so you don’t bother. You leave it and you move on, oblivious to the hearts you’ve broken. When in some other context you think about them again, all you remember is that someone else’s feelings might have been trampled. But you tell yourself it wasn’t your fault and don’t see the broken heart, not for a very long time. 

And then there’s trying to be a grown-up in those final months of your degree course. You possibly recognise that the season for learning has shifted and life is going in some different and exciting unseen direction. The original goal and its process are no longer serious, no longer worth the cost. You’re tempted to ditch the whole endeavour, or maybe only almost ditch it with some sort of postponement, a less ambitious goal. But the paradox rears its head again and you struggle to care. If  common sense prevails, you come to understand that you mustn’t give up. You recognise that all the loans, the working double shifts, the scrimping and going without, the hours alone with textbooks, other peoples’ ideas and endless essay writing, the opportunity costs, are indeed serious. You vaguely understand that somewhere deep in the layers that don’t take anything seriously there might be something else. You get that none of the huge effort can be ditched without impact. You fear you’ll be left with a sense of futility, of pointlessness and this you do take seriously. You see that giving up will pollute everything you ever do going forward, so you don’t give up. You make a profound commitment and finish the degree and don’t notice the change in you for years.

There are many such moments in an individual life. The moments when you’ve tried hard to be serious and it hasn’t worked out. Relationships, jobs, shared excursions and holidays that turn sour, deaths; it’s an endless list. Your choice is to keep trying to take things seriously or not, to take a high-risk chance on random and directionless drift. Avoiding committment might require extricating yourself from a key relationship, family, job, friendships, but the wreckage could be truly terrible. And the wreckage is not temporary. Once again the paradox.

Creating wreckage that you understand but don’t want to take seriously is inevitable, unavoidable, but it’s on a sliding scale. Sometimes escape matters more and this lets you not take the wreckage seriously. Successful escape will leave you with another inevitability, being terrified that taking things seriously again will once more entrap you. And it will. That’s the point of seriousness, of commitment, of not being temporary. And that’s the point of not understanding why you can’t embrace it. The paradox keeps on driving us to the next and the next and the next encounter. It might be a person, a book or song, a horse, cat or a hamster. Or it might just be the face staring back at you from a bright and shining rain washed window. It’s daring you to get with the programme and stop trashing what you love.