Better Than Life

When I left Seattle, I had an idea. Hell, I was on a crusade. It was simple (1. Get to the farm. 2. Farm.) and looked like it would work out well. I had people interested in the idea, who had their own ideas, and I saw how it could all come together.
Now I've been sitting on this piece of land in Tennessee for four months, alone and unaccomplished. How did this happen?

"A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside of it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

You know when Wile E Coyote paints a road onto the side of a building, and then the roadrunner dashes off into the painted scene? That's what happened. In my imagination, I developed the idea of what was ahead for me, and then I moved forward in my imagination.
Throughout the course of realizing, over the past week, what I've done, I have had some pretty wild thoughts. Initially, I overreacted by discounting imagination entirely. I felt like I had been a fool (I had) and that I should have never fantasized or speculated about the future. And on top of that, I lumped some things that I honestly believe into the "just my imagination" category.
Now, imagination is a powerful thing, and I believe it is a necessary thing. And like any other function of our minds, it is a tool. To build something with wood, you start with an axe, but once the tree is down, you move on to the other tools that you need to get the job done.

I'm glad I recognized that, because I was on my way to cutting out a huge part of my life. That would have been a huge step backwards for me, since anything that I have started since autumn has been a result of rediscovering things I had cut out previously. The road I've been on since December has reunited me with my spirituality and my emotions, and no matter what I thought I might have had ahead when I got here, it would have been just as unsatisfying as any other life I've led, if I did not have those very significant parts of myself integrated.

I see what I've done, I see how I did it, and I see how I could very, very easily do it again (and again and again and again). Frankly, it is hard to not want to do it.
At the end of the Red Dwarf book, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, Lister is living in the Bedford Falls of It's A Wonderful Life. He has been sucked into the novel's game/drug hybrid, called Better Than Life,* and has been living happily in this virtual world. [Yes, I am absolutely spoiling the end of this book. If you think you'll read it one day, you should just skip ahead a bit.] Once he realizes what I realized about myself, he decides to leave. But.

There, in the middle of the street, a pink neon sign hung over a shimmering archway. There was his exit, just as he'd imagined it. On the other side was reality.
It started to snow. Christmas Eve.
How could he leave them on Christmas Eve?
What harm was one more day? He turned away from the dissolving exit and crunched up the drive to 220.
One more night of that pinball smile.
Just one.
He couldn't leave them on Christmas Eve.
But, ofcourse, in Bedford Falls it was always Christmas Eve...

So now this is the good part. Now, I get to grow as a person. Now, I get to learn to act in spite of myself.

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Whatever actions we make, they are based in our minds, on our intentions. So rather than just going out and doing something,** I want to examine my intentions. One thing that I realize every time I end up in this position (and it was only as I typed those words that I realized that this is the position I always end up at) is that I haven't been reading. At these times, I start over, re-reading the books that have most inspired me to consider my intentions.

Illusions:
Siddhartha:
Ishmael:
Round the Bend:
Beyond Civilization:
The Element:
Wild At Heart:
Leadership and Self-Deception:

Keep reading
Keep talking
Keep active
Meditate

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*Imagine the Nexus from Star Trek: Generations***

**In the moments before writing, I texted to Age: "I feel like doing something in the face for this realization, and throwing bricks and bottles doesn't sound as horrible as it should..."

***I can't believe I just brought up Star Trek.