The Middle-Aged Man And The Sea

There must be value in feeling lost. The knee jerk reaction of wanting to get rid of this emotion has to be followed up by a willingness to find some meaning in it. Perhaps it's be beneficial to compare the feeling to growing pains - to a child growing pains are confusing and scary.

If you explain to that child that pain is a consequence of growth, or a precursor to it, that experience is transformed. When we realise what the broader experience or deeper meaning of that physical suffering is, we find something in which we can take solace, even relish.

I understand this whenever I put myself through uncomfortable, scary things otherwise I'd merely be a masochist. I think that everything must have meaning, I just fail to see it sometimes. I keep returning to Viktor Frankl because his experience is the extreme - if he found meaning in a Nazi concentration camp, then where can it not be found if we look hard enough for it?

Not only that, but the search itself can bring meaning. We are always a first-order differential equation away. In times like these, I've imagined myself as a lone fisherman who goes out to sea and waits for a fish to get hooked. My version going out to see would be to read a book on an unfamiliar subject, or begin a project at work, or try a new hobby. Most times I'd go out and not hook anything - not connect with anything. It's funny now that I think about it. I'm a fisherman hoping to get hooked.

Part of the problem perhaps is that I have a rather overtly romantic idea of passion. Visions of discovering a cause to which to lose myself in. I write "lose myself" but perhaps I mean "not feel my feelings". Feeling lost, or bored, or insecure, or unworthy, or alone, or fat, or boring, or dumb, or whatever.

Part of the problem is just this: feeling like I need to liberate myself from these emotions and thinking that the key is out there in the world. The right subject, or the right partner, or the right contact, or the right instrument, or the right this or that.

I ask myself if I'm expected to turn inwardly for the answers, to withdraw - and I think that this isn't right either. How can it be? Man is meant to be out there in the world, to explore, to push boundaries and expand frontiers. I wish that I had a clear answer, but I don't. There are mountains of books, many with very convincing answers, but for some reason finding an answer does not feel like the point right now.