Ego: May 2004 Archives

Swimming in icy water on windy day surprisingly uplifting and clearly good for the soul.

May facilitate onset of pneumonia. Or hypothermia. Or both, if lucky.

When I'm alone, I don't feel insecure, or feel compelled to worry about anyone else. Being happy becomes less complicated, and comes more easily, which is probably why some of my most poignantly happy moments are borne of my own solitude, with a little atmosphere mixed in to make them memorable.

There are people out there who don't cause catastrophic shifts in that kind of easy field of calm; comfortable people who make the best of any situation, rarely complain in earnest, and who know how to trust. It would be nice to connect with one, but at least I can count a couple amongst my friends; these people make me smile at a moment's thought; would that I could take them into my arms and hold onto them forever.

Someone obviously swallowed more river water this evening than was good for him; that, or it was doped with prozac.

It was while I was suspended upside-down from a capsized canoe this afternoon that I became aware of my increasing distaste for excessive introspectiveness. Of course, excessive anything is only excessive because there's too much of it, and I've recently found myself reminded of just how important balance is to just about everything in my life -- a lack of balance might well account for why I was upside-down in the first place, though I'm happy to point out that that was just a drill.

I enjoy getting out and facing new challenges, whether they amount to taking on novel activities, meeting new people or simply starting down roads that I've never been down before. It is nice to be alone, it is nice to be able to enjoy one's solitude, but it's also nice to belong, or at least feel that you do, and of late, I've come to realise that I've been spending a little too much time on my own planet at the expense of sharing experiences with other people. One of the things that has kept me there is the fact that I've become used to feeling that it isn't my place to experience too much pleasure, let alone my right to let people in to share it with me.

Then there's my difficulty accepting that some people do actually like me, that they're not just being there because they're polite and generous with their time and doing their duty in showing charity to the deficient. I'm rational enough to get past what I see as an ill state in my own way of thinking -- my self regard -- but I have to believe that there have been times when it has held me back, or made me unfairly and needlessly distrustful of people's wonderful genuineness. Am I so afraid of being seen as occasionally naïve when I do misplace my trust? Burned fingers can take bloody ages to heal.

When I first arrived in Cambridge, it didn't take very long to fall in with a number of people who I was able to consider my friends and partners in crime, but just a few short months along the line, I made some mistakes in my personal life. While the decisions I made, or allowed to be made for me, seemed fine at the time, they led to my gentle withdrawal from the circles I was quite comfortably moving in; slowly, the people whose lives I knew plenty about became people who I was just 'familiar with', and then they became people I could only really claim to recognise by face and name alone; friendships devolved into nods and smiles, in passing, on the street. A slow descent into a long and murky winter; on my doorstep, the colourful leaves on the trees withered and fell, and there was no spring.

Now that I'm alone, I see that I should have done things differently; knowing, as I do, that life goes on, I find that encouraging.