How do you improve? You put your first foot forward, though you fear the second won’t follow. But it does, and now you’re here. Progress crawls in its infancy. A child has no choice but to grow; a man can stay a child forever. Action taken is a fantasy lived in between every thought and pledged to stay ahead of you forever. The buffer between then and now. But something feels wrong. A vow to the self, now broken, falls gracefully forgotten. Yet in it something is lost.
Can a person live without the prodding need to still live better? Neglect lay on the face, on the skin, on the surface. But what if there’s no shame beneath it? What if you could be happy despite what you lack in the face of attaining it? Are you deluded, or are you sane? To live first in the world before living in yourself. To just be, with no desire to be different. To be better.
Maybe. Maybe if you hit me. Hit me hard with a wrench over the head so that everything went red. I’d wake up in a day or a week or a month or a year, and I’d forget who I was. Forget that happiness was not a state of mind, but an endless, endless action. An action I was too afraid to take and so tortured for. And then I’d just do it because I’d forget what I was so afraid of to begin with. And it would be effortless.
Or I’d just sit there and do nothing. In bliss, as dribble runs down my chin.