My mind

I'm not so much inspired to write very much these days, or to engage deeply in intellectual activity, until I have opened up a new project and have found a way to become fully involved in it.  Christmas and New Year were kind of deadening for me.  All my family seem way more financially successful than I, although I do not envy their lives.  I'm kind of very, very stuck, it now seems to me, although this realization has been quite new and comes as a result of having finally and definitively resolved some issues.  I have all the answers I want now, which means no more of the intellectual hunger, at least for the time being.   One of the discoveries I have made is that I simply don't like modernity too much -- which is to say I recoil from anything too polished and smooth.  I don't like being able to anticipate what is coming before it arrives.  But that is, in a way, the modern ideal, to be able to plan and prepare for anything to the point that there are simply no surprises, or no earth-shattering ones.   But other people's instincts -- including those of my family -- have been developed on the basis of a need for stability.  Consequently, there will always be misunderstandings and talking at cross-purposes until I can get myself into a stream that is really wild indeed.

In the mean time, I seem to have learned to defend myself quite a bit by means of Socratic dialogue.  I can keep people at arms' length this way, which does and doesn't suit me.  I like that method as I don't need anything from anybody modern, but it also feels a little cold at times.   Then again, it is what most people are used to, I think, in the sense of being cold-handled and treated like machines.  As an aside, one of my many failures has been in trying to find what is IN people in the sense of an adventurous spirit, and not finding anything there.   I should have learned the first time about this absence, but I kept repeating the experiment, because I couldn't really believe that such differences existed between them and me.  And, don't get me wrong, I have found a few shamanic types through my online communication, and hopefully enough to seed a new project as a historical trend.   I can always hope for that.