My desire — possibly along with my ability — to write has taken a nosedive in the last couple of years. For sure, I’ve lost a lot of motivation and inspiration to post on this site, and have seriously considered shutting this down; the sheer force of nostalgia is the only thing keeping me paying $30 a year to support this thing. It’s a new year, though, so an obligatory look back and forward.
In many ways, 2015 proved to be odd and unexpected. Looking backward, it’s hard for me to say whether it was a good year or a bad year. If I look at just the most poignant moments, hope and heartbreak dominate; and this accursed lower back pain appears to be permanent if I wish to continue dancing. But there were so many good things that happened, and it’s clear that there was a lot of forward progress on many fronts, even if pretty much everything exploded near the end of the year (maybe more on that later).
And so I look at my resolution for last year, and I’m in no better a place right now than before. It’s not unexpected in the least, but living alone for the last year hasn’t made me any more sociable, and any semblance of progress of putting myself out there was quickly erased after the sudden (but in retrospect inevitable) breakup. I guess I’m glad I had a chance at a relationship, although it’s just as ever ambiguous to me whether the pleasure outweighs the pain. Maybe for some people, falling in love will always be a dangerous and unsuccessful thing. It would take a special girl for me to be in a compatible relationship with, and each year I’m less sure that she exists. Oh well: if love is all there is to life, then I’ve been doomed for a while.
Moving out of San Francisco and back to Mountain View meant that I had a lot more time to read, and to think. A wide variety of disparate strands of thought came together in the past few months to form, for me, a coherent worldview. At some point, I might write more about this form of monism that’s been swirling around in my mind, but if anything can convince me to stop withdrawing from humanity, it is this: that we are all manifestations of the same source; we are all one.
I think my resolution for 2016 is to discover the strands that tie me to you, and to find those hidden wells of love that must exist.
A curious portent, or perhaps just something that tickled my fancy this past weekend:
The last two movies I saw in 2015, on Dec 31: Bolshoi Babylon, Home Alone
The first two movies I saw in 2016, on Jan 1: Fifty Shades of Grey (although we only got through maybe half of it), John Wick