Day 0007

"...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal."

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

Proust, like Tolstoy, often seems to echo back to me my own thoughts with greater precision and clarity. I have experienced the liberty of breaking out of the daily grind, ceasing to obey orders and living my own life in earnest and along with it I have also experienced the "melancholy" (or more accurately for me, the anxiety) that Proust sees in this transition.

The anxiety comes from having no-one else to blame but myself when my choices don't deliver what I wanted from them. When I was merely obeying orders, from my parents or from my teachers or from my bosses (or for that matter the implicit orders of societal norms), it felt like my life was governed by external factors and I was absolved of any responsibility for how it turned out or how what I was doing made me feel.

Now I have slowed my life down and attempted to divert all of my energies into the things that I think are most important to me I feel a tremendous pressure to be able to prove to myself I am living the life I should. The trouble is there is no real way of validating this that I can think of. I suppose 'am I happy?' would be a good place to start. That's quite a difficult question because I sometimes feel like I should be happy because I have satisfied so many pre-conditions for happiness, but actually in the moment of asking the question, I am not.

One remedy for this, perhaps, is to busy myself consciously so that I am once more hiding the future from myself, making it a life-choice to be so caught up in contingencies and seemingly unavoidable engagements and commitments (like doing a new drawing every day...) that I don't have time or energy to question whether I am actually using my time wisely or not. This amounts to the same thing that I think most people do through the existential palliatives of work and family life, except this would be a conscious self-deception. I'm not sure it can be completely effective.

Today I don't have a drawing to share; I tried for an hour to re-do that Rembrandt study but it ended up being so repellent that I binned it. I will try again in the morning and will post something here.