Standards of Living

I watch you as you load in your groceries at supermarket, pay with your credit card. Your standards of living will kill you in a couple of decades. All that greasy, fattening, salty food and evening snacks you worked so hard to earn. Beer to sip while watching TV, to chase down potato chips. Arteries jammed, all those bypass surgeries can't save your ailing heart, a time bomb quietly ticking in your heaving chest.

I made a decision to stay out of your world, your career and your kids and your rat race, but I don't know if that will save me in the end, or will that only cause me to die lonely. You live in your own bubble, I live in mine.

Still, hope remains in my heart.

Solitude is something you (more or less) learn to live with; a hermit in urban landscape. Sharing other people's coexistence can be so hard. My basic inner conflict is, whether to seek solitude or other people's companionship. It is obvious that my life is the recovering from deep wounds inflicted a long time ago, and like a hurt animal I retreat until I feel better again, but how long will the healing take? The whole of my lifetime?

I am stronger than I was, and the vastness of uncharted territories is awaiting me. To embark on this journey, but I will I be travelling alone? Is that my karma, kismet, my role in the play of life? Or maybe the playwright is just mad -- or at least a wicked absurdist -- or as some people think, there is no playwright at all? A world devoid of meaning -- would that be so incomprehensible? As we see in nature, there does exist self-organization in all systems; "fearful symmetry" as Blake put it, so it makes one wonder. If there is a pattern, where does one fit in there?

I think I'm a selfish person, used to play alone with my toys. Will there be a way to break out of my narcissism, or will it be a closed circle of personal navelgazing? I envy people who can think in the "we" form, instead of "me me me".