Of No Importance

It is funny, how I think I always have to be doing something. Making something, reading something, “on.”

I almost think that this overbearing since of responsibility is what I “rebel” against and thus do less than I would with a healthier relationship to work.

Work, productivity, something. All the barriers in my head, things to work through. Anxiety, attention, worth, ideas of desire and duty.

What do I think I have to do? Find a way to be successful. Know what I want, and try for it. I really am drawn to a life of imagined rigour, of measured progress, refinement (even in “vulgarity”), and a sense of human-ness.

To live, and consider oneself as human. Nothing more, nothing less. And to allow for the human-ness of others, and the world-ness of the place one is at.
That doesn’t seem to me too bad of a life.

I am drawn to strangeness, and yet desire to fit in somewhere. Appreciation.

“The [] that comes from loneliness.”

[] is a word similar to “feisty,” but with a positive connotation. I cannot remember it now.

What is loneliness? Is it a state of wanting, but not having? An absoluteness, the lack of others, of meaning? One can be lonely in company, one can be lonely alone. One can be lonely in a commited relationship.

Is it a property, a state, a desire, a lament? To be lonely is to be unsatisfied: this is not an axiom I necessarily buy.

Loneliness can be fleeting, it can be situational: lonely in one’s appreciation for an author at a gathering: the loneliness of a flat joke.

It is not difficult to be loney in company, even good company. But perhaps that is to stretch the application too far, too far. Far too far to be of any use describing actual loneliness.

There is again, that issue: linguistic slip. I can mean anything I want by these interior states, but what I actually mean is somewere just beyond the next word. Always just beyond. If only the sentence were a bit longer, the language a bit richer.

Do I consider myself lonely? At times, yes. I am looking for meaning, for something external to help me arrange myself. It’s the same issue, the same repeated neuroses. I am solitary, which is no the same as being lonely: but neither is it separate. I spend a good deal of time alone, but then I somewhat always have.

In undergrad, all those hours in the library, at my apartment, reading, travelling. Wandering the streets alone. Relatively convinced that I had to want to be with people more than I did.

Do I consider myself happy? At times, yes. For a score, mayb 35-70% of the time I am content enough. Happiness is far more elusive.

Putting my library collection into Zotero makes me happy. So does reading a particularly good bit of scholarship, or seeing a cute animal, or making a friend. Getting a compliment, receiving good news, getting a gift. Feeling gratitude towards the people in my life whom I love. Remembering all that has contained in my life so far. Music. Art.

Escape, creation: discovery, appreciation.