Frightening, that is, in how much they resonate with me…
Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?
…
What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.
…
I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.
That last one, in particular… yeah. I’ve often said that one of the big appeals, for me, of the movie and television series Highlander is the “what-if?” idea of immortal people being able to live many different lives down through the ages. The idea of having time to be and do many different things. I struggle almost daily with the knowledge that there just isn’t going to be enough time for everything I want to do in this world, all the places I want to go and things I want to accomplish, and that so much of the time I do have gets eaten up with mundane bullshit like household chores and paying the bills and commuting.
And that middle quotation… I struggle with that too. The sense that the potential I was always told I possessed is unfulfilled and my powers and chances are fading…
I think maybe it’s time to go for a walk in the sunshine…
