Mirthless musings

Why do we do what we do? Why do we do anything? What drives us? What do we live for? People say that you can't live for others and that you have learnt to live for yourself; to make yourself happy. Well they may just be wrong, at least about the second part, as the notion of living to make oneself happy is just about the most ridiculous and pointless existence of which I can conceive. Perhaps I haven't understood what is meant when people say this.

I think S., P., S. and B. may be right. Why should we get up in the morning, go to the shop for milk or indeed do anything at all if not ultimately for love?

There's not much love in my life at the moment. I'm too busy being angry, frustrated and, as a result, a bit self-obsessed to love a great deal. Perhaps the source of my distress is my failure to my responsibility to love. There are people whom I love, and my love for some of them commands more of my attention than my love for others, but for no-one do I have a love that is totally pre-occupying; an unassailable and perpetual passion and commitment.

Presently, I am the most important thing in my life; a fact I find wholly unsatisfactory. My current preoccupation with the question, "What do I want?", and my apparent inability to shake its grip on my mind, I find most distasteful.

I sense there must be a great deal I do not know or understand about 'the human condition' that a lot of other perfectly ordinary folk do know and understand. What has been written of man's instinct and desire to survive, to produce and nurture a family, to be part of something bigger than himself? I ought to find out.

I'm not sure how compelled I am by the first two of those desires, but I've become convinced that if I am to live on, existing only to serve my own whims and fancies in a perpetual pursuit of self-gratification is contemptible and in any case impossible. The list of things I realise are of negligible value or none whatsoever increases, but this does nothing to answer my questions.

What, then, am I to live for? If I have not the love that I declare to be the thing that gives meaning to life, where and in what am I to find purpose? Am I simply to exist without meaning until the object of such a love as I have described materialises, and if so, for how long? Who is to say it ever will appear?

Perhaps this view is mistaken in its uncompromising dismissal of anything but this love. Further thought required. In the meantime, I remain a hapless halfwit, meandering clumsily through life with little idea how to set about tackling each day. If I bump into you with my haphazard weaving, I apologise.