just when you think you've got enough, enough grows

This was probably supposed to be an email, but instead it's turned into a blog post. The emails were about the struggle- the futility of all these beginnings, given how many of them lead to endings. What's it all about? They scream and then they shout.

It's a strange thing, because I feel I've had this conversation more than once and with more than one person. Echoes reverberate. Strange because there are these scotch-soaked discussions I've had with Seekers, people on a quest they sometimes do not quite recognize. Stranger still because it makes no sense that I'm in their company.

My ambitions are so small, to me. I'll take a quiet life, a handshake- I'm not looking for a rollercoaster, I'm okay with no alarms and no surprises. But then again, apparently I am a liar. No matter how little you long for in life, as long as the longing persists, I suppose the size of your ambitions hardly matters.

In short, I have no words of consolation. I can empathize with the frustration that comes from the fall. I understand how, even though it's most of the time exhilarating to want, all that yearning can often be exhausting. And I especially know what it means to want something and not get it. I know that disappointment.

But what would you rather? Throw down your anchor by some dreary shore and punch the clock every morning with the lunch pail in hand? There's an undeniable dignity to that, to the kind of steadfast existence that such constancy requires. But the trouble of it is that you've got to have that in your blood. You can fight it, but we're all just a bunch of molecules- eventually, we go back to our thermodynamically stable state, the place where we are most us. I guess, from time to time, it's natural to flog ourselves a bit, bemoan that we're not other people, people who don't have to dwell on such dilemmas, people who go from point A to point B to point C in a straight line without the hint of a doubt. But when that's over, it always comes back to- would you rather be someone else?

I'm perhaps sheltered and stupid, because I, for one, believe that if the answer to that question was ever yes, then I would start pondering whether it was time to become someone else. I've been a lot of people before, so I can't help believing it can always be done if necessary.

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Sorry. Listen to the song of the week this week instead. It is much perkier than all of this noise.