Vapourous Goals

There comes a time in most people's lives, I understand, when they come to the sad realisation that this is all there is. The dreams of youth give way to the mundane realities of real life, and they acknowledge to themselves that they are, after all, just an ordinary person and not the special gift to mankind that the whisper of youth in their head said they were. And that there is not some great task that they are destined to do, just a long long list of small and dull tasks.

That's when men tend to buy big expensive cars and make a few foolish decisions for a while.

I've been feeling a bit like that, but I think it's mostly just an adjustment process. Although I knew that leaving the brethren would be difficult and painful, in some corner of my mind I thought of it as a gateway to something, kind of "in one bound he was free". Instead, not much has changed since, and it's taking some work persuading myself that, actually, that's OK.

I have spent many years telling myself that I was building up to something, and that all the skills and knowledge acquired in the meantime would all be valuable one day. When times were hard I patted myself on the back, knowing that there were things I could do that others couldn't, and sometime that would be just what I needed to get somewhere.

Note all that vagueness. Something, sometime, somewhere. At the moment, my goals have evaporated due to insubstantiality. The barriers have gone, and with them my sense of direction. That's a tricky thing to deal with.

Still, I have a good life, and if nothing much changed for quite some while it would still be a happy one. OK, so I feel there's a hole where some ambitions used to be, but that will be fixed in time. There's no hurry, and when it gets to me I can talk it through with someone understanding. I am learning that it's OK to just "be" sometimes, to go with the flow rather than push and drive forward. When I have learned more about the world as it is now, and about myself in the process, I hope I will be in a better position to make some wise choices.