What am I looking for?
Too many things.
I want to be the farmer, the lover, the writer, the laborer, the wanderer.
I once read about how being overwhelmed with possibility is just a way to avoid actual action. If you attempt nothing, the possibilities are endless, limitless. By never making a choice, you never fail at any of the things that you imagine you could do. The groundless dream is always intact. Then again, you fail by default, never having achieved.
M.-L. Von Franz calls it an identification with the
puer aeternus image in his
The Problem of the Puer Aeternus:
"...there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about. If this attitude is prolonged, it means a constant inner refusal to commit oneself to the moment. With this there is often, to a smaller or greater extent, a saviour complex, or a Messiah complex, with the secret thought that one day one will be able to save the world; the last word in philosophy, or religion, or politics, or art, or something else, will be found. This can go so far as to be a typical pathological megalomania, or there may be minor traces of it in the idea that one's time 'has not yet come.' The one thing dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the one human being that one is." (
Ego and Archetype, by Edward F. Edinger, page 14)
This
puer aeternus idea is the idea that "to be something in reality," a person "must give up everything
in potentia." By choosing something to dedicate yourself to, some trait to fully cultivate, you are giving up all those endless possibilities, all those untainted fancies. But never committing also means that you are someone who "never brings any reality to birth."
This is a such human quality, a weird combination of fear of failure and delusions of grandeur. I see it in myself, as I'm sure many others do. But it is deeply frustrating, and it makes me wish for that one simple thing, for painstaking hours of labor to lead to a single accomplishment. That one piece of fruit or that one carved fragment would feel more pure and whole than years and years of dreams and ideals, no matter how pretty.
Does it matter what that one simple thing is? Is it more important to just choose it, and cultivate, and live in patience and silence and hard work? Or should we wait for the right moment, the right cause, the right fit? Maybe there is no way to know the right fit, just the pressure of our own push, the contented weariness of actual work.
I went to the salt, for the first time in years, to try and baptise myself. I wanted it underneath my eyelids, on every inch of my skin, I wanted the salt like some vinegar-pure cure, that could help, when I was too-much-indoors, too much the robot, pressing buttons, nodding, repeating.
