Today so far may be summarised as ‘a sense of emptiness
punctuated by frequent irritations.’
I’ve talked often on this blog about how the question ‘who
am I?’ involves examining the extent to which life has been a constant
succession of role-playing activities. Take away the roles, and what are you
left with? Answer: very little of substance. And yet the need to dispense with roles
becomes paramount, because only then can you live life honestly as who you are.
But there’s a problem with that. Life is structured in such
a way that engaging with it usually requires the conscious or unconscious
assumption of roles. If you don’t do that, you tend to get left in a vacuum,
and a vacuum is not only a lonely space, but also one in which irritating
phenomena echo and become magnified. (It’s like making a noise in an empty
room. The sound is louder and more strident than it is in a room which has
carpets and furniture to soak it up.) So if the loneliness doesn’t get to you,
which it usually doesn’t with me, the irritations do.
And that leaves the fundamental question: what do you fill
the vacuum with to soak up the noise of irritation so it doesn’t leave you feeling
constantly edgy?
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