Enlightenment at 3:00pm

I exchanged emails with a friend yesterday, much to my benefit. One line I wrote:

"I pace the walls of my cage, chafing to begin another life."

His response to this and the general tenor of my email was:

"I'm sorry to hear that you feel caged and that you are biding your time. I find that that feeling has less to do with where you are than it does with what you are doing. The limits of introspection are the boundaries of your self. There are so many other things to investigate that it seems a waste to spend a life staring at your own soul. But this is just my opinion - and it is not commonly accepted."

This set off a chain of thoughts that culminated this afternoon with a stunning vision as to why my choices and situation seems so pathetic:

Though I have abandoned religion, even withdrawn my name from the church, I haven't fully reconstructed my worldview. My natural introspective tendencies, buttressed by a "spiritualistic" upbringing have left me torn in two, valuing materialistic results, but deciding on spiritual values. This is a conflict that will not produce much happiness. I need to make materially important decisions, for materially important results.

Maybe this doesn't seem like a big deal, but to me it seems like the missing key I've searched for since leaving the church.

Three things I've known, but felt conflicted about that now seem clear as day:

1. My job is limited and sufficating. I am not happy doing this job because three years tinkering with the same code is like reading the same book in several translations, but nothing else.



2. I NEED to leave Finland because I value a better income and a nicer social/weather climate more than I value my children's ephermal connections to their Finnish cousins. (I want them to know their family, but realy a few weeks a summer is more than enough.) Or my own connections to Finland.



3. The brooding and pointless thinking must end. Thought without action is mental masturbation; I need to focus more on doing. Thinking is easier, but it is not it's own reward. I should know. I have about 1,000,000,000 things I've thought about and never started, or started and never finished.

Perhaps this is all illusion, but this feels like the clarity I've lacked. My friend's words were like a splash of cold water waking me from a dream. I've dug myself into such a rut that I when I first read his words I was unable to imagine what else anyone could do, but pace their self's boundaries.

These idea segways into thoughts I've had about material explanations for people's personalities/attitudes vs. the notion of free-will. Melina and I have discussed this and I have learned much from her. Since I have chosen to live my life on materialistic principles, a life without god-given morality and soul, this division is much more important than I had imagined. It's consequence keeps growing with every thought I spare it.

It actually was planted reading Darwin's Dangerous Idea last year. It then grew reading Ken MacLeod's sci-fi novels and blog. Melina has filled in the social implications based on the liberal vs. communitarian arguments that she's studying now, and my friend pushes me over the top. An interesting chain of events.

Here's to a brighter future.