In the depths of the past...
I recently salvaged a virtual treasure trove of old email, photos, and writings off an old computer I am getting ready to sell. The pictures, I expected. The email and writings took me by a surprise that was more than pleasant. Indeed, I believed that I had long since lost most of it - spanning roughly from early 2000 until mid-2004 - a span of time that I have long referred to as my Blue Period (overstated, sure, but also appropriate).
In early 2000, I had recently moved out of my parents house for the first time - at least, half-way moved out. I was spending a majority of my nights staying up, watching The X-Files and sleeping in until late afternoon. I was coming out of a break-up (a person's first break-up is never just a break-up, of course - more on this below) and hadn't regained my bearings. With the comfort of home, the safety net of friends, and whatever particular mental predilections I had at the time, "bearings" were scarcely on my radar. I lacked the skill of self-stabilization (and perhaps I still do, in a way). I drifted. (I only recently started to understand that I did this as a characteristic of my personality - I wasn't "damaged"; I was reacting how I was inclined to react, for better or worse.)
A break-up, of course, can always be destabilizing. It is a catalyst, and what it becomes a catalyst towards is a function of the particulars - of the people involved, of the timing in life. A first break-up is only more likely to happen at an intensity and during a time when these catalysts will provide for more volatile trajectories.
My life was full of immense variety and gave me many surprises in those four years, but in at least one way, it was homogenous - I was almost always within the shadow of depression. Perhaps, however, I have forgotten just how much variety I experienced - both externally and internally in that time. I hope that the writing I did during those periods of time help me in that sense. I skimmed it the other night. Some of it came back to me. Some of it blew my mind. Some of it even scared me in at least one way - reading those entries, I realized that I was, at least for a period of time when I was emerging from depression, more conscious, dynamic, creative, and expressive than I am today.
I always worry that I am falling into the grooves - that is, the grooves of ingrained behavior, to use the metaphor Steve Jobs used about people who grow older and get caught and dragged inexorably into habit and away from conscious decision and thought. Getting better at things is NOT an evasion of habit - quite the opposite. Work, then, is a prison to this fate because it predisposes us to the process.
I worry, more than anything, that life seems to be a little too good, at the moment. I have Merry, I have a good job, I have the money to do whatever I want. I have hobbies I enjoy, I get excited by lots of things in my life. I am never bored for long, and when I am, it is more temporary burnout than boredom. The weekends occasionally suffer from the boredom of the privileged - too many choices, and among them the luxury that we choose simply to rest.
What am I missing? Something, I fear, that will only be seen in hindsight. I finally can do anything I want - the curses of poverty (of mind and money) are vanquished. Will time show that I chose wisely, or that I tragically fell into a trap I had trained - and thus baited - myself into?
