land of opportunity
If I learned anything at all from the last couple of years, I have learned that within certain (primarily financial) limits it is incredibly easy to create for yourself the sort of life you imagine you want. That's all I've been doing lately with these erratic hops around the continent: dreaming up what seems an ideal situation, and then waving my hand, hey presto! to call it into being.
The obvious problem is that these situations quickly turn out to be unsatisfactory. And their essential failing—that they don't involve other people in any substantial capacity—is of course what made them so easy to conjure in the first place. That's what one misses: the destabilizing influence of one or many others pushing one's life in a direction that one could not possibly have foreseen in the shower in Iowa in 2002, when one was constructing the idea of an ideal ascetic existence in the desert. Et seq.
Community is the word we are looking for. Heyo, community. Surprise me.
