Liminal Thoughts

We always feel that we could be doing something better with our time. Or that, somehow, whatever we are doing does not meet our expectations. Dissatisfaction is a form of distraction. We can never commit ourselves fully to anything, nor can we give anything our full attention. When I am not working, I feel that I should be doing something more productive; when I settle down to do that thing (writing, emails, doing my taxes, whatever), I immediately want to take a break and do something mindless instead. Therefore everything is a distraction, and we feel ourselves constantly pulled away from the "something" that we should be doing instead...but is that "something" itself not a distraction? And wouldn't we be happier if we treated whatever we were doing in the moment as the most important thing? There are moments in which we are doing nothing, and yet we feel completely satisfied.

Why do we persist in doing things that we don't like, that don't make us happy, and that don't give us hope for the future? In some cases because we are forced; in others out of a misplaced sense of duty. 

Most of us, most of the time, are failures. This is not unexpected: there are many ways to do things wrong, relatively few to do them right. We should probably just accept this as a condition of life; instead we obsess over achieving one of the very limited set of outcomes defined for us as success. There is something incomprehensible about failure. You hit the same shot a hundred times, you nail it in practice, but when the moment comes the ball goes into the net - your timing is off, your angle of approach is wrong, you're too excited and hit the ball too hard. You've misjudged something, but you don't know what. In intellectual and artistic pursuits, you have an idea, you begin to develop it - and then suddenly you lose your place, you're unsure how to continue, and the whole project collapses in confusion. We are constantly trying to live our lives in pursuit of some ideal (even the materialists among us), only to find out after 20 years that we are in a very differ...