cruel cruel world

Never are my hopes and dreams for the future more poignant than when I feel sharp dissatisfaction with my life in some way. Escape is often my first instinct and today was just one of those days where some far off, idyllic life was at the forefront of my imagination.

I'm constantly surprised by how ugly people can be. Living in a city provides daily reminders of man's inhumanity to man. Something as simple as blowing through a red light or refusing to let someone in who is trying to merge are symptoms of a greater disrespect, an over-arching disregard for one's fellow man and, if you take it far enough, the world in which we inhabit. I suppose that it is natural enough to look out only for yourself, for many people they spend their entire lives just working out what is between their own narrow walls and so to ask a person to consider someone else as an equal, to consider their needs and wants, their very existence as valid as one's own is quite a stretch. Still, somehow we expect other men to give us that same consideration that we so jealously distribute ourselves.

Often, I think that we are fundamentally flawed beasts and that we exist to the detriment of everything else both animate and inanimate. I want, in this life, to make as little impact as possible. To live fulfilled but quietly, to tread lightly on the earth and among my fellow man. I honestly find that difficult to do in the context of this modern life. Not to say that any past life was easier or that there was a time in the history of man that we were in perfect accord. Quite the opposite, actually, is my belief. This modern life, however, is my life, the life I know and the life in which I feel constantly at odds. I yearn for a solution and, on days like today, I think that--for me--that solution may be a kind of voluntary simplicity and solitude.

Today, someone that I counted as a friend but who is also a coworker took a fairly heavy stab at my back and I was, quite honestly, felled by the blow. I want so desperately to live in perfect harmony with everything around me and yet, through some failure on my part no doubt, I am unfailingly at odds with it. I want to escape to a place where I can be self-sufficient and good, where I can forget the world and where it can forget me, where I am not involved, removed from the ever-churning gristmill of strife. If I must live this life to its end, I want so much for it to be peacefully so that, when I am gone, I will have bettered mankind without his even knowing it.