Is this living?

I finished Notes From the Underground, and it got me thinking, particularly at the end. It doesn't take much these days. Many things I encounter regularly have revealed life lessons, even cartoon reruns I've watched dozens of times.

I once comforted myself with a belief common in Buddhist teachings, considering each trivial task as a labor of love. The tasks themselves weren't important. I focused on my frame of mind. That hasn't been working very well lately. In fact, the very thought itself has been met with an army of opposing thoughts in my own mind. I once fought against the bitterness, assuming that it would make me hard and callous if I allowed myself to feel it. These days I often succumb to it completely, but the outcome is not as I expected. I am not inflexible or unsympathetic. Although I am not as talkative and it seems like I appear outwardly less approachable (judging by the way others treat me), I feel more. I hear more. I understand better. Something inside me is opening. I am quicker to shut people and things out, exterior influences that I believe are toxic, but everything else is allowed to wash over me. I submerge myself in listening, watching, paying attention, and I allow ideas to echo inside my mind to see if and how they take hold.

At the end of the book, the narrator talked about the assumptions we make about how to live our lives. He talked about the excuses we make up to validate the fears that hold us back from truly living and fully experiencing life. This spoke to me. I am filled with fear. The things that I feared most have already happened, and yet I am still controlled by fear. I thought that losing my job, my path to the goals I'd set for myself, my tentative foothold in the capitalist economy and the illusion of financial security would ruin me so absolutely that I would cease to exist, but here I am. Some days I feel like a great weight presses down on me from the removal of those crutches, but other days it feels like the weight was actually lifted when those things were lost. Illusions, every one of them. Certainly one is liberated by the removal of Illusions, right? Then there is this other, this nameless burden, this weighted tether holding me and causing me illogical despair. I said before that it is empathy, but it is so much more than that. I walk among them now, an ocean of mindless apes slowly marching to the grave. All of my life I believed in magic, luck, spirits, divine intervention disguised as coincidence. I took crazy risks because I believed that I had an invisible safety net. Now I only fantasize about it, accepting that it is nothing more than an imaginary friend I created to distract myself from the truth. Now I ask myself, which is living? Was I living when I believed in the the magical and wondrous or am I living now?

I'm not depressed anymore. I am grateful for it. I am grateful for many things. At the same time, I have no hopes, just wishes. No plans or goals, only dreams. So what am I afraid of?