Lifecycle of an Illusion

When I was twenty-two I was depressed (still) and bored and drunk, most of the time.  There was a stage where I realized how badly I needed to stop drinking and start trying exciting things and start expressing myself in some way that amounted to something.  I was certain, in my painfully shortsighted way, that what I needed was essentially a reset.

Now, there is another illusion beneath the one I am after, but about it, I will only say: I have often had thoughts that suggest I am the sort of person that believes that we are products of our environment, expressly.  I would never consciously assume such a thing - nor do I think it today - but in subscribing to a lazy potential solution to my problem, I was suggesting as much.  I will say, for the record, that such a theory can hardly even sustain illusion, it is so weak.

The idea of a reset is really the idea of escape in disguise, or a slightly practical manifestation of the idea of escape.  Deep in the human genome lay the secret of our desires - when we are faced with a difficulty, our deeply-felt preference is for it to simply go away.  It takes significant conditioning to abject reality to obstruct such a desire from interfering with day-to-day life.  And, the degree to which each of us EVER produces such obstruction varies immensely.  Typically, modern difficulties require methods of dispatch that are not impelled by instinct or the natural order of things.

When I was twenty-two, I wanted to reset all of it, and I was certain that the way to do that was to move away, certainly from familiarity and likely from people altogether, or to a place where my interaction with people was limited to my own discretion, which I would of course "want" to limit prudently, because I would have been reset into perfection.

Of all the quick "solutions" to the escape problem that people come up with time and again, moving away is one of the easiest, most absurd, and finally, funniest.  Funny, that is, in extreme retrospect.  The absurdity, for its part, is breathtaking.  In these reactions, it betrays itself.  The desire to simply change locations as a solution to life's problems is almost always nothing more than an emotional expression.  There is little logic capable of supporting such a notion.

Why do I spend so much time pulling this apart now?  Because what I have done recently, when I have chosen to spend my vacation alone, hidden from view, is just an evolutionary descendant of such a silly initial desire.  I have found little of what I desired and expected to find.  I have even now, in retrospect, identified the disconnect - which, in such a simple formula, cannot have been very many things, so I should not be especially proud of figuring it out.  I am guilty of believing that what is desired can ever be expected without the complete understanding that comes from nothing so ordinary as taking the time to ask exhaustive questions and objectify reality.

There is a word for that rare feeling that comes when you get what you want, in practice, without the effort: serendipity.  It is never something you earn, any more than anyone ever earns the random vicissitudes they are granted.