Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Don't Worry About It

Incidentally, don't let posts like the last one worry you unduly. People are out there committing great deeds with worse Health Crap than I've got. People with diabetes, HIV, and cancer envy me, because my incurable disease is a nuisance, while theirs is busy shortening their lives. Only mine is - you know - mine, and the times it prevents me from doing what I want to naturally loom larger to me than the times it doesn't. If nothing else, this fuels my escapism, which is a large motivator for literature.

Escapism needn't be a lazy, unthinking quality. It has, in fact, fueled a lot of hard work through the centuries. As Edmond Dantes's desire to escape the Chateau d'If prompted hours of steady work scraping rock with a spoon, the desire to escape disappointment, discomfort, and particularly that great scourge of mankind, boredom, prompts us to obey our divine natures and create despite the sucking quagmire of daily survival. Sometimes we create things others can share and sometimes we horde it to ourselves, and often the people around us will criticize our escape activities. But they have their escapes, too, which aren't any less, or more, silly than our own. The desire to escape gravity prompts great myths of flight, soaring poetry, practical designs for load-bearing balloons and heavier-than-air vehicles - and plunges off of cliffs to grisly death.

We all have the right to our own particular form of escapism. How much good that right does us is partly up to us, and partly chance.

Whatever it is - go for it when you can. That way, when you can't, you won't have those lost chances to brood over.

I'll be more cheerful when it warms up. Probably.

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