Cat Through the Window Lives Out in the Field

Along the swift passage of "middle age" and its attendant, personal ills-- decline of physical beauty, disintegration of bones and organs, likelihood of blindness through glaucoma and macular degeneration-- and having survived cancer for a number of years-- it is somewhat effortless to be less attached to the superficial and sensational and more inclined to broader and deeper experience.

Such sensibilities are not confined to the aging or elderly, certainly, and such yearnings are present in children; nor should it be supposed that such an attitude of mind is the mere result of trifling illnesses, a greater sense of mortality, or world-weariness.

No; look round about and what becomes clear is a consciousness of general cultural malaise, whether ubiquitous frenzy, absurdity, foolishness or existential nausea, belligerence fueled by powerlessness, selfishness, self-absorption, or myriad combinations of all these and much worse.   And it was ever thus-- the surrender to an understanding of reality no more valid than that of the perceivers of the shadows in Plato's analogy of the cave. Consider the patterns generated, the movements and emotional impulses suggested; note the interwoven continuum of cause and effect, and how social, "other-directed" motivations are culturally and individually reinforced.

Anyone can have a a reasoned indifference to things of that nature.  The more abstract things take on a greater reality, a greater presence, in contrast.  A degree of order and aesthetic pleasure are not bad things to experience at all.