"Whilst I was young and strong I was capable of very warm attachments, but of late years, thought I still have very friends feelings towards many persons, I have lost the power of becoming deeply attached to anyone, not even so deeply to my good and dear friends Hooker and Huxley, as I should formerly have been… The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. " - Charles Darwin
As a child, forming emotional attachments is essentially all that we do. There is little recollection of the past, preparation for the future, or settled lifestyle. As we grow older, the opposite is true, and we constantly remember and honor the past, are always thinking and preparing for the future, and we follow a procedure or a routine for most of our day. There are many reasons we may draw away from a tendency to form new strong emotional attachments, but at least three of them have to do with this tendency in old age.
The more time we spend living in the past, the less time we have for the future. this takes the form of recollection, anecdotes, and comparisons, and takes one of two forms. The first form is where we literally don't live in the present - when we daydream about the past, ro constantly think about what has been. It is often so much easier to feel strong emotions with something we already have strong emotions about. Thus, when I read an old book again I am not just experiencing the book, but all the book has meant tome over the years. It draws us in. We often form emotional connections when we are in need of them, when we feel lonely or bored with what we already have. When we can, in our minds' eye, go back to live in the past, then we can find those emotional connections there. If I am lonely I can remember my friend and be happy with him now, as I was then. If I am happy remembering an old game I used to play, then I can go back and watch that game again, or read up about it to learn something new. In this way, through learning about the past, we may enjoy our present. The second form is when we honor the past - when we remember the time we were a Marine, or when we feel pride in being a Lancer. We can take refuge in our self-identity at this time, and so, if not form new emotional attachments, at least strengthen the old ones. As well, if we are part of an organization, like the Boy Scouts, a school alumni group, or a church, then we can form new connections. It is just that those new connections we form, with new people who we meet and interact with through our organization, are less important to us than the emotional attachment we have to the organization itself. So, they appear to be less, because they are always something greater.
As well, our awareness of history may lead us to prepare more for the future. As a child, the future is usually either far off, as in 'I want to be an astronaut someday', or very close by, speeding up all the time, a 'tomorrow' which we fear or love, and a 'almost now' which we race towards as soon as we finish our current project. If we want something, we want it now, and the procedure for getting it is not as important to us as the end goal. When we are older, often the exact opposite is true. Life becomes more and more about the journey and not the destination - not least because as we gain powers of vision, we lose the edge of clarity. We can take our time and enjoy ourselves, and even if we fail to gain what we want, we can live with it. Failing to achieve a hoped for end, or dealing with the actual arrival of a fear, are both things we have faced before. Very few things are truly new, are truly revealed by the light of dawn and not the faint beams of a lamp. We find it harder to gain emotional attachments because we know we can survive if they fail, we know how much it hurts to lose, and we are more willing to let our care grow slow and strong.
As a child we so often seem to have boundless energy, and then the older we get, the less energy we seem to have. This is true in a technical sense at the very edges of the spectrum of age, but in illusion for most of our lives. It is not that we have less energy overall, but rather that we spend so much of our energy doing other things. It is harder to follow a routine than not, because we live in the moment. To follow a routine is to extend ourselves, our lives, backwards and forwards. It is to stretch ourselves out, so that we gain breath and lose depth. Live, and our knowledge of ourselves, becomes less uprising, less bright. We become blinded not because there is less light to see by, but because there is more space, and that space is filled with things. To form an emotional attachment, we must move things aside, we must have room in our lives and our hearts to care for these new things, and that means that we must either extend the space we already live in, or we must move some other things aside to make room. It requires more energy to live, because it takes more energy to maintain our lives.
To gain the power to form new and deep emotional attachments, it can be helpful to forget the past, ignore the future, and break the routine of the present. The more settled you are, the less power you have to maintain your heart. That is, Darwin's suggestion that the loss of power to form new emotional attachment is injurious is because as we lose that power, we gain the power to utilize what we have in the pursuit of what we have. Our lives become more circular and less spiral, more about keeping what we have, drawing out what we've kept secret, ignoring bogeymen in our closet, and continuing on the path we've already set out on. We care less because the souls of others become less visible to us, and their bodies more solid, as our souls grow clearer to us, and our bodies farther apart from us.
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