No particular place to go

Today is my first full day of non-employment since about 2001.

I enjoyed the five-plus years I spent on my most recent job. I got to ramp up the hardware side of our operation and push the creative envelope. (Not that the average designer would consider what I did particularly daring. Within context, though, we made a lot of progress.)

Some other things changed during the time I was there. A few people to whom I felt especially close moved on. I fell off the non-attachment wagon in a big way with one of them. As our staff shrank, I found myself doing less and less of the work I was hired to do and more and more clerical-type work.

And I've re-evaluated a lot of things as regards the basic nature of reality. At the moment, it's hard for me to have a sense of importance about anything at all. As I've written before, our natural state is to be inanimate matter - talk about your ultimate state of non-knowing, non-thinking. All the stuff we get dragged through, or drag ourselves through, during our brief interregnum of sentience seems irrelevant.

From the Great Pyramid and space travel to oil changes and love affairs, it's all faint flickers of light on the periphery of the universe. (Well, maybe not the Great Pyramid. That was the tallest building on earth for more than a thousand years, and it will still be around long after we and our latter-day works are dust.)

So, I plan to use the rest of my time as animate matter watching the world go by with about the same level of interest one might have in a run-of-the-mill TV sitcom.