Fantasy and Release

Fantasy allows release, there's no doubt about it, and we need some degree of fantasy to live in reality. 

We don't have perfect memories.  But.  I've been sober for over eight months now.  This isn't an experiment.  It has yanked my thinking out of the clouds.  That's a bit unsettling, lonely even, not having those thoughts around.  Now's where I should insert the bit about moving toward an ever broadening goal of progress and betterment. I'm not sure about that.  At the same time that I'm not destroying myself, I'm not taking tremendous steps forward toward the sheen of betterment.  Perhaps I am without knowing it.  Perhaps I'm living in the moment beyond what I can recognize.  I'm not sure.

I do know that either way, life moves by fast, and that some fantasies are better left in the dust bin.  I don't know which ones quite yet.

I had a thought about nostalgia the other day.  It was, basically, that nostalgia is the longing for a better time, when our inherent value seemed higher.  The thought was, more succinctly, that such longing is for ignorance of our own standing in the world.  That is, a time when we were younger, by necessity, a time when we didn't know as much based on sheer experience, a time when we were more important.  I'm not sure, you know, I flail around these things all the time. And I haven't quite landed, although some things are headed in the right direction, I do know.  I don't have the kind of rabid insecurity that makes me question everything to such a degree that I won't take a step forward. 

I don't have the kind of insecurity that allows me to take comfort in the awkwardness of every situation.  I'm still left wondering what else is out there.  Perhaps this is a bit of a luxury. I know it is.  There's an article the current issue of time magazine about the self-help industry.  There are apparently folks who work as "life coaches" for other people.  Think about it. At some basic level we want to somehow check in on the world and what's going on to make sure it matches what's going on within our heads.  Fantasy is a funny thing, because at the core, it is abstract thought, thinking and being somewhere we're not.    It is endemic to existence, and it breaks us away from our existence at the same time.