Another day slips



Another day slips past me. And then another week. And now a month….
I sink further from the ideal. I feel a high-calling continuing to grow away from my reach. When I was younger, I comforted myself with the thought that there was still time for an impressive virtue or talent to suddenly blossom in my life. Now, as I get older, the ceiling of my capabilities is more apparent, and that realization is disheartening.
The gap between my sense of naïve entitlement-to-greatness and my actual place in life continues to grow. And it elicits despair.
I live the life of a man, a well-fed, social, literate man. What do I have to complain about?

The state of man:

—subjugated to an ape-like existence
The ape-ness is inescapable. I cannot do without social hierarchy, or food, or sex, or any of the other vulgar-and-base conditions of this existence.
But there seems to be something hidden in ape-ness. I imagine that in a different time, or in a different human/cultural embodiment, a person would call this hidden quality the divine... They would say something along the lines of God in man.
Despair…this realization that I am not entitled to greatness (greatness on human terms) is a necessary condition of cultivating my soul. My simple every day experience is becoming richer.

The things I aspired to in my youth—fame, wealth, unearned greatness, unearned power—are becoming false idols: inauthentic desires imposed by the ambivalent forces of Life and culture and society.
What was it that I really wanted as a child? Did I even want anything? Was I not a self-propelled wheel?

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