I have been writing on this site for four years. Check the facts. I struggle with them also. Some would call it excessive, all this needless writing. I look back and smile to myself. It seems to be mainly a struggle against naivety. In that, there is a hint to be detected. We are what we resist, as what we pursue. We become our choices.
I still just can't believe that my life is almost over. When one considers the richness of youth with the frailty of age then years alone no longer strike the balance. Which, at 45, they likely wouldn't anyway. I've heard some call living to 90 as being somehow "lucky."
I am told to just value different things, as if.
I have bored of abstaining but recognize its usefulness. Restraint is easier than collapse and ruin, though not always by much. One must learn to systematically choose it in advance, which has a deadening effect. With a little practice anybody can desist. It takes quite a set of balanced qualities to ever achieve moderation in a thing truly loved. With success - prudence achieved, impulses tamed or bested - it becomes so easy to then convince oneself of the value and glory in excess. It's an easily sold idea. Neither state holds much charm for others, or self, for very long.
Most are momentarily pleased by what they consider a change for the better in another. Only the devil moon delights in disintegration. It becomes fullest in human curiosity.
Those who have lived for excess must strive to achieve what others seem born with: the ability to maintain a wealth of personal boredom, a reservoir of dullness and lack of invention.
If you have ever been fascinated with someone relaying the tale of how they achieved moderation then you are a dolt, or worse, an ex-addict. The elegant survival of excess is the story worth telling, worth hearing.
But, we are all of us getting old. It is easy to understand how we too easily forget these things. We become a mockery of change, a disaster of habit.
Everybody must stalk their center when it roams. Temptation and indulgence are always within reach. They are a comfort against too much foolish consistency, the hobgoblin of little minds, Emerson reminds us.
As I write these words I can hear it marching in the distance… Soon, it will arrive: me singing the soft praises of sudden salvation, the many values and virtues of shapes lost.
Hallelujah, here I am, again.
"The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years." - Proust
"Moderation is only a virtue in those who are thought to have an alternative." - Henry Kissinger
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