Often in life, we find that what we don’t have defines us more than what we don’t. I’m not immune to this as someone could gleam from my previous posts. It’s a sense of loss of things that I’ve never had to begin with. I’ll make a list here of things I often get stuck on, things that seem to irrationally consume my thoughts. It’s a cliched list of clichés, demonstrative once again that all things in the human experience are natural to the human experience and have happened and will happen for as long as we can call ourselves human.

• Lack of a romantic partner. I’ve for the longest time always scoffed at the feeling of wanting romantic companionship, dismissing the picket fence like some Bukowski wannabe in my floral shirt stinking of hard booze. Now, out of the fog of my own arrogance I see and open field and no one to walk with in it. I see on other side of fences not on my own patch of sunnier times, united times and stable futures. I see nothing in my future but the chasing of shadows.

What does this show but a lack of happiness within myself and my own future if I feel that I need someone to wake up next to? Am I incapable of waking up on my own like I have done so many times before for so many years? What’s there to be found in shadows but the absence of light? Each shadow looks so perfect from a distance, like something I could see myself being attached and tethered to by a silk cord. Yet each time there’s nothing but the absence of my own light in this field. It’s delusion isn’t it?

• Time. I need more time to do everything at it’s proper pace and with the attention each action deserves. Right now, as I type, it’s 21:44 and I can’t tell you what I’ve accomplished outside of work. I sleep, work, eat, wash, go on my phone, fuck about on the computer with online friends. There seems to be little time for anything else, bound by the constructs of my own routine and work schedule.

More bullshit, isn’t it? The reality is that if I really wanted to finish all of my reading, I could. Every thing on this planet exists within the same 24-hour rotation and same 365-day solar orbit. I have exactly what I need yet I seem to need more. A glutton for more life unspent.

• Financial freedom. Currently, I live with family due to several reasons yet the taste of independence calls to me from the past and demands a return. I can’t, I simply can’t. I don’t have the financial stability nor the comfortable living situation with another human being just to interact with to be a part of some wider experience. I feel trapped in a routine of someone else’s making, stifled living as an extension of someone else’s life.

Shit happens. If I’m unhappy here, the likelihood is that I’ll be unhappy in a Grand Designs model home designed to my exact specifications on some private land somewhere. I’m not being cruel to myself when I say this but it needs to be said. It needs to be blunt and honest. Covid-19 happened, the world happened, fate happened. There will always be something to be stifled by if I let it. There will always be some unwanted encroaching of my own independence and freedoms. Whether than be a set meal time or mortgage repayments.

• Serotonin and a constant level of self assurance. I’d want not to be reliant on medication to keep my brain chemistry in order. I want my confidence to be enough that I never have to question or look back with critical eyes on my past. I want to be able to speak to a friend without thinking about the interaction and break it down to tiny anxious fragments of semantics and potential miscommunication.

If I didn’t reflect to a degree, would I be considering myself stoic? Would growth happen? Would learning happen? Where are the mistakes to learn from? As far as my own brain chemistry is concerned – there is nothing I can do. It’s an uncontrollable condition, aided by a daily intake of citalopram. What more is there to do? Get on with it, live my life.

Ask yourself now, what thing that you do not have are obsessing over instead of being grateful for what you do have? Take stock of your own abundance.

“Today I escaped from all bothering circumstances – or rather I threw them out. They were nothing external, but inside me, judt me own judgements.” – Meditations 9.13

Z3N0