The realization that I'm just floating here, just barely, buffeted by the waves and currents of increasingly terrible and terrifying events, with fabled creatures of the deep moving ever upward.

I look around and see only darkness.

Despite being at the secret center of the universe I am (of course) utterly ordinary, now leading an uneventful life in a quiet town in a European backwater far from any notion of “home”, 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 unspent productively, when none of it will matter.

It’s one way to live, I suppose.

And as I write this it’s all sincere, with the soft round pain of a three-drink hangover behind my right eye making me feel empty and stupid on a Saturday morning. The center of my universe is broken.

But later – when the water and coffee kick in, when I take out the trash and feel the sky above me, walk to the grocery store and stretch my eyes by looking at the far distant mountains that I will never climb – I’ll feel magnificent, and the whole great wheel will start turning again.

I will live another ordinary, uneventful day, alive at the center of it all.

I lie in bed and stretch from head to toe, focus on my breathing, and prepare to confront what I think I wanted when I was younger, when I was young. Let's say 18.

I remember, or think I remember, because the pain, some decades old and rather vague - like the outline of a bruise - is a little disorienting. Is it now or then, and where does it hurt?

Well, let's not be dramatic. I had a lot of pain then and not much now, none at all as I write.

I remember having no real interest in money, or career, or any aims at all beyond being left to myself and exploring that. I wanted a bohemian life, of a sort. A life of my own, with interests and books, a life abroad and with love, novelty, colors and peace.

I remember now, I think I remember. I wanted to be left alone and find some treasure that no one could touch, no one could steal.

And I found it.

Old friends come for a casual lunch, stopping by on the way home from elsewhere. We get a little high and they stay until almost midnight, and my mood stays good for days.

So many lives I’d like to lead, to have led, spinning off in all directions, the multiverse inside my head, fueled by curiosity and indulgence, pleasure and sloth, love and more love and more love.

A drive to be both fully in the moment and wholly out of time.

If only health and happiness were enough.

What started as cynicism and despair evolved into an acceptance and then celebration of all that remains, which is everything.

It took me some time to get started, to go off the rails and escape a respectable fate. But ever since then I've been endlessly, tirelessly fascinated with myself and how the world inside interacts with the one I see and the one that more objectively is. Both on the surface - as represented in the roles we play and the cultures we inhabit and make - and the one that remains largely unknowable, which lurks deep at the base of it all.

Everything which happens to me happens only when I'm alive, including my knowledge of all the things I didn't and don't experience, and all the things I imagine and misunderstand. So much compressed into a handful of decades, if that - like everyone, everywhere, ever.

I sit quietly, eyes closed, and breathe in and out, let the worlds within me expand in all directions and then collapse to a point. My breath, my body, the smallness of my presence. 

Absurd, unfathomable, and awesome.

Two thirds in, if lucky, and we hunker down and understand there'll be few more fresh starts, that dramatic changes for the better are unlikely, and our final form, near final, is closer than the last chance of escape we once had.

Yet the joy is real, the feeling that we got away with something, learned some of the secrets, all quite simple, and did more or less what was planned, which was nothing, while avoiding the worst of the fates.