As with most things in life knowing when to quit is as much instinctive as rational. It is in fact somewhat amusing to witness one’s own declension from an erstwhile seemingly favoured stance to a distinctly more clarified position, rather like watching overcooked bacon minimize to obscurity in a frying pan in a sea of its own juices. The point is this, there comes a time when the obsession is at an end, when the brilliance of the Bishop’s ring no longer succeeds to mystify or promote any foreseeable purpose or advantage. It’s caput!

We become bridled by these objectives often without fully appreciating the design and imputed satisfaction unwittingly attributed to them. Tattoo for example. Where once it overcame all reason and meaning to adorn one’s natural being with such decoration, there can follow a sudden awakening which objects to the remastering of one’s corpus and which reactivates a newly discovered purity no further at hand than the beginning of one’s first breath.

Considering we’re here talking about the evaporation of passion and fantasy (I know of no other way conveniently to describe one’s changeable worldly preoccupation) the elimination of that objective is both notable and indescribable. In a moment the lustre is gone! And the moment it’s allure disintegrates, so too disappears what once qualified as reason for the initial absorption. To be clear, while certain features of this paradigm may resemble the decomposition of personal relationships, my focus is instead upon the nexus of the mind and matter; that is, I am focussed rather upon the dissolution of material devotion, everything from peanut butter to automobiles. The analysis may usefully be extended to a metaphorical description of the rusting of professional ambition or other modifications and subscription of one’s innate talents.  Again the point is this, there comes a time to quit, not necessarily because you’re ahead or behind of anyone or anything, but because you’re inner mechanics tell you you’re done, you’re cooked, finito!

Nor is the resolve to be confused with quitting before things get much worse.  My more paramount concern is that we fail to quit without knowing things can be much better. Being as we are creatures of habit we’re also instinctively inclined to repeat what we’ve always done. Quitting such historically favourable climate is both uninviting and unknown. But while we may not know why to quit, we curiously know when to quit.

This is but another of those natural imperatives which predict our direction and development in life.  And lest you prefer to debate the basis of my proposition, let me ask you instead, if you’re not listening to your own inner voice, who exactly is in control? And do you really think you have so much to lose that you cannot survive being momentarily unhinged from that particular mooring?