Don't run, walk.

Out at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers calls to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistle chains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles of athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children's murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that had left his life had left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The best he can do is submit to the system and give Nelson the chance to pass, as he did, unthinkingly, through it. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become first inside, then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

- John Updike

This passage of Rabbit Run resonated with me as I read it yesterday. In the novel, Rabbit leaves his wife and tries to drive away from Mt. Penn, Pennsylvania to escape (boy can I relate, but I did a much better job in the end). He ends up coming back and shacking up with another woman in Reading who was kind of a prostitute. He acts like a conscienceless prick the whole time absorbed in this search for the feeling that he's lost, like the perfect golf shot (didn't I write this novel?). Anyway, through his unconscionable refusal to use contraception and the mores of the times he spreads his seeds like the instinctual creature he's nicknamed for. Here he realizes the hard truth. The same hard truth that I, and I hope, for their sakes, most of my fellow twenty somethings are struggling with realizing. That you are not, in the words of Tyler Durden, "a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile."

It's sort of a liberating realization. That is, when you get past the vision of yourself that you've built up since childhood. Ones determination to right the wrongs of the previous generation, or finally live the correct way in the face of all the people, like robots beating our their lives in monotones, living the wrong way, is going to eventually seem ridiculous. The substance of life is misapprehended in childhood. In childhood the promise of life and the strength of the sensation of life are congruous, and a time when that strength is dampened by detachment and age, and the promises about what life holds cease to apply to you, seems impossible, like death. But then you realize, that this is life. This is what they've been talking about all along, you've just been misinterpreting them, and they've been letting you out of mercy. There is joy and potential but realistic joy and potential and there are going to be many many minutes and hours and days and years wasted and forgettable, and plenty to be cloyingly sentimental about. But in the end you should apprehend what is real, and the ability to deal with life in actuality is a liberating phenomenon because you're finally free of the illusion and free to take real steps.

This is why I disdain but understand religious joy. Sure I can find joy and love in a lie when it's believed but reality is in front of me and imagining substituting reality for a happy lie is akin to attempting to retain my childhood, even into old age. At least that was real, even if, after it has passed the attempt at retaining it seems pathetic and desperate. And beyond desperation it seeks to reject the truth that is elemental and impossible to actually reject because of fear. The worst of our motivators, fear. The fear of liberation and thus responsibility, the maintenance of the illusion even after the nature of the illusion is irrevocably realized, that is too much. I'll take life as it is because it's all there is.