Complications

Complications are enhancements to make ordinary wristwatches more expensive, things that somehow make you feel you own a Porsche, things intended to inject excitement into timing a soft boiled egg, convince you that you really are the sort of person who cares about elapsed time in some contest, convince others that you have daily need of knowing such times.

Outside of watches, complications are man's closest companion and as a consequence, have effect on women as well.

Complications are the engines that turn the wheels of Reality; they rev up the action in story and send persons involved in relationships off into unintended orbits from which they struggle to recover.

Complications are things that were supposed not to have emerged in the Good Old Days, although those same Good Old Days were not so remarkable as a retrospective glance might make them seem. True enough, things cost less then--a nickel or a dime, because of their buying power then, were adventures waiting to happen; you could get a cup of coffee, an ice cream cone, a comic book, a soft drink--and you were undoubtedly younger, thus better able to duck, outrun, or merely stand still to endure confrontation. But things only seemed less complicated. Age and perspective cohabit in the cabal of complexity, providing perspective for it of not a full exploration. But the perspective remains the only relative thing in the calculus; complexity inhuman affairs, wherever and whenever it is found, seeks its level the way water does in an aqueduct or, more to the point, complexity, like a carp in a pond, grows to fill its enclosure. Wherever we are, at any given time, complexity has taken our measure as though a Hong Kong tailor had fitted us for a three-piece suit; it even allows for the waist to be let out should the need arise.

Our first awareness of complexity often arrives as a matter of a choice that has been presented us. You close your eyes to expedite the time travel back to a voice offering you either of two stunning prospects that you become lost in the interstices. Tentatively, you essay that exquisite choice, smug with the problem-solving approach that has come to your mind. A little of both, you venture, only to be made aware how quickly such simplistic answers depart your sphere of awareness. "No! Chose one or the other. Not both." The reason behind this, you learn, is the reason not of logic but of power. "Because I say so."

Soon, you will learn to use Because I say so, and without quite realizing it, you will have gained admittance to the Big Tent of Complexity wherein motives--yours and "theirs'--become paramount and your interpretations of them are now the determining factors in your future behavior.

Complications are as much you as they are of those about you; they are your interpretations, your reading of a script, your interpretation of what someone means or wants or means and wants when he/she tells you he/she loves you. Complications are your understanding of how it is you have nothing against chocolate but the flavor of vanilla is ever so much more subtle and representative of you, this awareness taken to a new level of complexity when you are heartbreakingly in love with one who prefers chocolate. This means there will be a thin coating of chocolate on everything in your life, your silver, your dishes, your tongue, your other body parts including your heart. You cannot get through life without one such complication, one such love, one such story; you cannot pour your heart into a story or a libretto or ballet in which you demonstrate the futility of war without encountering someone who tells you he or she enlisted as a direct consequence of having heard/seen/read that particular work.

You may think you can renounce all such complications by means of the monastic life but even there, choices are to be made, consequences of them haunt you as you are forced by conscience and heart to chose between the dualistic or non-dualistic approach. Even there you might be tempted to say, you'll have some of each, but the answer is always the complication of No! Because I or someone or something says so.

Were you to be successful in determining the source of the I who says so, thinking to work your wit and charm upon It,you would still find the complexity of It preferring chocolate to your vanilla, and you by now being heartbreakingly in love with It.