Older, but no wiser

- Suppose you were to wake up tomorrow morning, and overnight there’d been a miracle, and the source of your concerns had vanished, how would you know? What would be different?

- I’d feel a sense of purpose; I’d know why I was getting up – I’d have something that I both needed to achieve and wanted to achieve.

- What would tell you that this was different from other days?

- I’ve already told you; I’d have a sense of purpose.

- Don’t you have a purpose now?

- Only to stay alive. Yeah, I know, that sounds terribly defeatist and I don’t mean it quite the way it sounds. But at the moment my purpose is to get to the end of the day having done everything lined up for me to do, without upsetting anyone, without having any arguments, without feeling guilty…

- That’s a lot of “withouts”; what about some “withs”?

- Well, that’s just it. That’s exactly what I’d like – to have some positive outcome rather than just the lack of negatives.

- Surely the show was a huge positive?

- Well, it should have been; to anyone else it would have been. And in many ways it was – yet running right through it all was an underlying fear of not being good enough, of making a mistake, of fouling it all up. Success was getting to the end of each night without being seen (or heard) to be not up to standard.

- You feel under judgment the whole time?

- Exactly! And if not someone else’s, then my own.

A fragment from my journal, from a few weeks ago. I was reminded of it when I read this line, a quote from Carl Jung, at Dan’s place:

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”

"To kindle a light in the darkness of mere being"; the more I think about it, the more meaning those words have for me…