After a bit of a chat with a friend of mine the other day it became abundantly clear to me that my blog serves no real purpose, so to speak. It has no truly useful content that might contribute to the progress of humankind, nor does it particularly assist or inform. Unless of course you are seaching for information regarding the lack of flamingo salesmen in my neighbourhood, which in fact, I can’t help you with either.
Such musings brought me back to the idea that I don’t serve any particularly useful purpose either. This is a somewhat sobering if not depressing thought, but something which is not necessarily there just to point out my failings. My hope is that it might inspire me to better things, or assist me with clarity in those things which I already do. Hopefully I will be able to find something to throw myself into with a greater cause than greed or vanity.
This is my quandary.
It’s been a while since I’ve just sat with my headphones on and brain dumped. I’ve been talking and thinking, pondering and kneading thoughts in my head.
I hear so much about goals. Places to go, things to be, tasks to do, feats to accomplish. My problem seems to be that I have so few of these. I don’t mean that I haven’t been anywhere or done anything, what I mean is that I have so few concrete ideas of landmarks or static desires. I’m devoid of checkboxes. I can’t break my thoughts down into the number of women I want to love, the number of wonders I want to see, how far I want to go, the job title I want or the letters that I want to have listed after my name. I struggle with this kind of thing. I try, I really do. Things would be so much easier for me to strive for if I could put a frame around them and give them a name, but for the life of me I can’t manage either.
I can do it with things that I know, things I feel and what I’ve done. I know what I like, what I enjoy and why I feel the way I feel about these things, but I can’t seem to join the dots together to see what the big picture I’m making is. I feel like a blackboard sheet on Mr Squiggle, a mess of shapes and lines that don’t seem to make up anything. Upside down, upside down. And always ‘Hurry up’.
As much as it might help, I can’t seem to label myself in any kind of useful way.
I think I’m searching for some kind of existential validation. Something more defining than ‘God loves you’, or ‘we are animals and we are here to reproduce’.
There’s nothing in my job right now that couldn’t be replaced by a couple of how-to guides and a handful of small perl scripts. That probably doesn’t help instill much of a sense of purpose.
The only thing that I know I want to do with my life is to be a good friend. That’s all I’ve got so far, and lately I’ve been doing a pretty mediocre job.
I keep staring at these squiggles, but I can’t see a damn thing.