I am too far gone, it is true.
It is true, because when you have drunk deeply from the cup of life it is difficult to ever get back.
When you have cut the rope, and the ship has sailed, there’s no point in saying ‘ oh, hang on a minute, maybe I should turn the ship around again.’ No. Because the ship has already left the harbour, and it is now under influences other than yours.
The tide is pulling it further out to sea.
Age plays its part. I am stuck in my ways. I have strange predilections and habits which I can only imagine intensifying, not decreasing, in the years to come.
I hide from the sunshine in the afternoon. I get jittery if I am away from my work for too long. I get bored easily. I continue to seek excitement obsessively in the same old places, even when those places barely hold any wonder for me any longer.
The other night, in my forties, I found myself sitting alone in a strip club. ‘I wonder if I’ll become a dirty old man one day,’ I thought.
I had to laugh.
I read an article by Mark Manson recently in which he described a digital nomad who was so moved by seeing a young family playing in the park together that he burst into tears, knowing that he had rejected that life, perhaps permanently.
In the Brexit negotiations, the UK government are playing for time, avoiding having to make a firm decision on the future of the country outside the EU.
I am like the UK government. I am sitting on my hands, playing for time, avoiding having to make a firm decision on the future of my life.
But the time of reckoning will come for the government and it will come for me too. There is only so long you can obfuscate, only so long you can put off binary decisions. Decisions that have consequences.
It’s funny that I have come down on the ‘remain’ side of the debate with Brexit in politics, whereas in my own life I tend more towards a reckless, Brexiteer position. Without going into huge details about it here, this is basically because I believe that when you’re talking about a country of 60m people you should pick your battles carefully.
When it’s just one guy with no dependents, well . . . party time.
But I am coming round to the position that I am too far gone. Tom Torero has said there comes a point when you wake up one day and you say ‘yeah, this is what I am.’
Well, maybe this is what I am: unmarried, childless, a writer, self-employed, mobile, nomadic, and avoidant of commitments of any kind that threaten my freedom.
Maybe that’s it. Maybe I just buckle up and commence the roller-coaster ride. Say to hell with it all. Let the chips fall where they may.
There is very little holding me back, really.
Anais Nin wrote:
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
I changed everything to opt for life, but too often I find myself veering off course, veering towards death. It is imperative that I find the courage to stay on course, to move on through my own process of becoming.
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