A lot of the posts on this blog communicate a youthful anxiety about the present and an optimism about eventual clarity in the future. Somewhat subconsciously (or as the master procrastinator I am), I left it to my older and wiser self of the future to sort out my motivations and justify why I am as I am and why others are as they are.
Growing older has given me more tasks for daily passage of time. I want to compost to reduce my carbon footprint, forsake single-use plastic, and listen to NPR to avoid living under a rock. I try to grapple with schism between the scope of my daily struggles/pursuit of happiness in context with the larger suffering of the world. I think I am virtue-signaling to myself that I am alright, I suppose.
Taking cues from current discourse on how to navigate a relationship between oneself and the world is one approach. Religion or philosophical theory may offer answers to others. In order to shed self-responsibility for my outcomes I've been tending to go where the wind blows, which while freeing, is also constricting to a certain local landscape.
Sometimes it does feel a little bit hmm-inducing to continue down your track, too afraid to step off the track. So you look around at others on nearby tracks, but they are also looking around and convincing themselves that the track is fine. And so it goes (oh no!)
To sum it up, I want to live more intentionally but having intentions sometimes seems excessive. [Come back to this in a few years.]
Maybe that is the nature of fragility? The context of this piece is different, but I like how it encapsulates a fatalistic trend towards disorder, so you try to hold still to avoid hastening an outcome. "To leave a support system can mean to become more fragile, less protected from the bumps of ordinary life. And though fragility might be a consequence it can be recruited as cause: as if you willfully caused your own damage by leaving the safety of a brightly lit path."
