I am becalmed. Three years ago I truncated what had become at times a punishing professional occupation, a relentless agitation with no foreseeable abatement. Then in a sudden mixture of foresight, decision and serendipity it came to an unprecedented halt. I quit working and sold everything. I was at last set adrift!

Since then it has been a comparatively free-wheeling ride. Certainly there have been remnant obligations to address, wrapping things up so to speak, and a heightening of familial duties, but nothing approaching the drudgery of gainful employment. Frankly I doubt that I could have kept going, the pace was too rigorous.  I would not have been able to sustain it. Thankfully I also resisted – or, more accurately, resiled from – the fleeting keenness for political involvement and abruptly withdrew my name from nomination.

But now I am at a standstill. My new vernacular is the antithesis of what it was – no rules or conventions, no longer constrained or inhibited. I am literally staring at the Ocean over a cup of tea and the ends of my toes. I seek to enlighten myself with an improving British novel but the expatiation of 19th century society rather wanes without the stimulus of a frozen martini.  I also quit drinking alcohol three years ago and instead have had to learn to accommodate my confessed lack of intellectual acuity and social fizziness, a hard result of what began as an inspiration.

Nonetheless I succeed to divert myself, cajoled as I am by the conviction that insight – though incremental only and seldom flamboyant – is a gem not easily mined. Like getting fat and turning grey, a philosophical bent is as inevitable as old age. It isn’t something I’m especially pleased to accept – particularly as its cogency tends to trivialize a lifetime of hedonism and materialism – but I suppose it has its own rewards. I preserve myself from the risk of becoming a kindly little old lady by critically examining the products of my current relationships.

It perhaps assists to remind oneself that the universe is ultimately personal, a convenient escape hatch from the conviction of wisdom. Withdrawal into one’s own clichés is at least potentially less offensive than becoming over scrupulous. The vacuum of occupation cannot be filled with vitriol notwithstanding the depth of analysis of life and its actors. I haven’t the stomach for polemics of that order. Nor am I convinced that dissection of even a gold-digger is assured to advance my cause or any cause for that matter.  Just one more thing to be tolerated along with a sunset and the blue sky.

So for the moment I am stuck upon a sea of platitudes. Synthesis has forever been a slow derivative. And I have never been known for my patience, clearly an impediment to the compound. My adjustment to the distress of platitudes is as trying as any other resolution. How odd it is that clarity has become so monotonous and bland. It frightens me that I haven’t the turbulence of mercurial emotions to compensate for the serenity of my life.  I may never see those days again. Instead I must confront a state of disinfected reality.