To say that my life is contextless is perhaps to overstate the case. I have a context, but it is merely the one in which I find myself. It is not something that I have constructed myself. I haven’t gone to any great pains to think about the meaning of my past, just as I have no great plans about what I am going to do in the future. In this respect, I am like the majority of the Earth’s inhabitants. But it wasn’t always so.
In the past I embraced the concept of meaning, imagining a glorious future, viewing my past under the microscope, and observing significant patterns. Every birthday and new year’s eve, I paused to reflect on my life, wondering where I fitted in, where I would be able to make a breakthrough and do something extraordinary. I used to write down the puritanical routines that would keep body, mind and soul at their optimum levels. I stretched in the morning with my yoga, but there was a sense in which I was stretching all the time — never content in myself, always unstable.
The solipsistic years are over now. All that picking over the bones and rotting flesh of the previous year, searching for marrow to sustain the assault on the castle in the clouds that represent my ambitions, all of that is gone. I am embodied, I exist in the here and now. It is a liberating feeling, but I’m nostalgic for pain and purity of the past.
Perhaps my lack of faith in the future is a reflection of my obsession with the end of the world: it’s not worth planning for retirement if you believe society is on the brink of collapse. If so, maybe my embodiment isn’t authentic and is in fact reactionary. Why does that even matter?
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Leave a Reply