I’m not sure what I expected by rejecting the world, other than to have the world reject me.

As a teenager reality was mediated by books and music, film and TV, with the latter rare distractions, the former something I fell into with headphones and a library card. Easy ways of escape, and modeling, for the most part, emotions, not lifestyles. And then the lives I did experience on the page were mostly poor, or so it seemed, and mainly bohemian or wretched, but certainly, and above all, self-obsessed. This was the model I molded myself on, or the one that fit best my nature. To explore the world inside to untangle the knot of the being one was born and bullied into. To escape. To live in an eternal spring and summer. To feel free. To be happy.

Now for me this meant going inward and outward, away from home and convention, but also from society, from hope, from ambition, from connections, from the world. And so I found myself at a certain age with nothing - no friends, no acquaintances, no coworkers, no achievements, no abilities, no money, no past, no present and no future, but still inescapably me, having lived a life of indulgence, sloth and lucky escapes, or flash memories, strange pleasures and madness away from the crowd.

A life both real and unreal, lived fully and barely even started.

Of course I’m utterly ordinary, leading an uneventful life in a quiet town in a European backwater, with nothing interesting to say, nothing interesting to do, just biding my time until there’s none left, almost none, when then I’ll look back at what I did and didn’t do, the hours spent unproductively, when none of it will matter.

Over time all that promise faded, but not before it shamed you.

A youth spent living young dreams, and now the dreams of middle age. A safe home. A pension. Teeth and legs that work. A mind and life that haven't been wasted.

Outside, the seasons continue.

My life is falling apart, and so is my home, but inside I make the best of things.

When I first found out about Daoism / Zen I wanted that emptiness and clarity, the ability to live both in the moment and out of time, a feeling I chased forever after. And with the decades I succeeded, perhaps, in that I find great joy, great presence of mind, when I’m doing the dishes, or laundry, or some other mundane task.

Which is great, a real boon to mental health and all that, but not exactly a life of great note when seen from outside.

The guilt at having done nothing.

I was a shallow young man who thought in terms of cool and uncool, good-looking and ugly, a general mess who brought more pain into the world than joy. Life was a very serious business, but I was already throwing it away.

I was entitled, thought the world owed me a life, or at least a living, and so was lazy, self-indulgent and self-satisfied, going near endlessly in, rarely looking out, simply playing with myself and not others. It was my life, and I was doing what I wanted, more or less, or at least not doing what I didn't want to do.

Doing nothing compounds.