Life of a young man

I wrote this four years ago almost to the day:

I’m steadily achieving a clarity of mind which I have been unable to find for the last few months (or as long as I can recently remember – like maybe even while I was at high school, I’m not entirely sure). By clarity of mind I mean that I’m not constantly worrying about what I’m doing, what I’m not doing, what’s ‘real’, what I should do in life (and what if I get it wrong), am I a good/bad person, will I fail/not suceed at something and so on. I mean, it’s still there but it’s not enveloping me like it has previously. I tried to take a lot of stuff on my shoulders and I don’t think you (I) can do that directly – I become unproductive and stagnant. Like you can think so much about what should be done and what you’re not doing and what’s wrong with your life and the world but if you let it control u dealing with it becomes impossible. Ok, it’s like this. Just say there’s this huge stone u want to move. If u try and deal with it all at once and take it on your shoulders you know it’ll break your back and you’ll never get it anywhere. But you try anyway, cause it seems like the ideal way to move the stone. But then you realise you can break it up and focus on moving smaller parts of the stone, and that succesfully moving little parts of the stome are an accomplishment in the first place. And then u realise that you’re lucky to have a stone to move in the first place, and although other people may be moving bigger stones faster than you’re moving your stone, and instead trying to copy the path other people have made with their stones, and comparing your stone to theirs, you realise you’ve still got your stone and if you focus on moving it, however insignifacantly, you know it’ll go somewhere. And you also realise that it’s nice to rest against your stone every once in a while, instead of constantly trying to move it. And of course, people often come over and help you move it, or combine their stone with yours so you have a bigger stone.

So, in my case, I’ve been resting on my stone for a while, or moving it back to where it was previosusly to see if the earlier spot was better, or moving less recognisable parts of it, a combination of the three actually. And because I hadn’t moved my stone forward for so long, I began to wonder whether I could move it at all, and I began to think that I needed to move it all at once in the right direction, even though I didn’t know where that was. But I’m starting to move little bits, or at least beleiving I can move little bits, and I’ve also found comfort in the fact that whether or not I move the stone at all, it’ll be gone soon enough, and I won’t have the choice, so I may as well see how much further it can go.