“It is not that we have a short time to live but that we waste a lot of it. We are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short. Life is long if you know how to use it.”
Seneca
There is not a single day that I don’t think about writing. Each and every day, I contemplate the pleasure of writing my thoughts down, telling the paper how I live, who I live with, how I get on, the mundane trivia that occupies my daily existence. This catharsis eludes be because of fear, mostly. Fear that I cannot speak openly or honestly about what I truly think, and what I feel. Thoughts and feelings are not commitments. I am not committed to any passing thought, no matter how recurring. There is always the possibility that once a thought or feeling is put down, it will rest forever, never again to be recalled or relived. This is why I write, so that I may set down things once and for all, and turn a page, and change, and if I cannot lay my thoughts down to rest the first time, than after many tries. This is how to live.
I have a 10 week old. I have a domestic partner. We are getting on. I work from home, I garden (though farming more closely resembles the scale I’ve achieved), I drink beer, I think about writing, I buy things on Amazon, necessary things, of course. Things that supplement or aid my efforts to create a more comfortable or resonant lifestyle for myself.
Happiness is not important.
What is important for me is meaning. As I become more detached and desensitized to the mundane grind, I will arrive at a point where my life reveals itself as meaningless, and I will gather up my life force and concentrate it towards the achievement of some monumental goal to stake my meaning in once again. I can never predict when those moments will arrive.
William Dare 