I wouldn't start from here
LightNews LightNews
banner
iwsfh.bsky.social
I wouldn't start from here
@iwsfh.bsky.social
6 followers 23 following 180 posts
lost and found in #midlife #MiddleAge
https://iwsfh.blogspot.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
iwsfh.bsky.social
#midlife #MiddleAge
Old friends come for a casual lunch, stopping by on the way home from elsewhere. We get a little high and they stay until almost midnight, and my mood stays good for days.
September 10, 2025 at 4:43 AM
iwsfh.bsky.social
#midlife #MiddleAge
So many lives I’d like to lead, to have led, spinning off in all directions, the multiverse inside my head, fueled by curiosity and indulgence, pleasure and sloth, love and more love and more love. A drive to be both fully in the moment and wholly out of time.
September 10, 2025 at 4:42 AM
iwsfh.bsky.social
#midlife #MiddleAge
If only health and happiness were enough.
September 5, 2025 at 5:10 AM
iwsfh.bsky.social
#midlife #MiddleAge
What started as cynicism and despair evolved into an acceptance and then celebration of all that remains, which is everything.
September 5, 2025 at 5:10 AM
iwsfh.bsky.social
#midlife #MiddleAge
It took me some time to get started, to go off the rails and escape a respectable fate. But ever since then I've been endlessly, tirelessly fascinated with myself and how the world inside interacts with the one I see and the one that more objectively is. Both on the surface - as represented in the roles we play and the cultures we inhabit and make - and the one that remains largely unknowable, which lurks deep at the base of it all.
August 31, 2025 at 9:58 AM
iwsfh.bsky.social
#midlife #MiddleAge
Everything which happens to me happens only when I'm alive, including my knowledge of all the things I didn't and don't experience, and all the things I imagine and misunderstand. So much compressed into a handful of decades, if that - like everyone, everywhere, ever. I sit quietly, eyes closed, and breathe in and out, let the worlds within me expand in all directions and then collapse to a point. My breath, my body, the smallness of my presence. Absurd, unfathomable, and awesome.
August 31, 2025 at 9:58 AM
iwsfh.bsky.social
#midlife #MiddleAge
Two thirds in, if lucky, and we hunker down and understand there'll be few more fresh starts, that dramatic changes for the better are unlikely, and our final form, near final, is closer than the last chance of escape we once had. Yet the joy is real, the feeling that we got away with something, learned some of the secrets, all quite simple, and did more or less what was planned, which was nothing, while avoiding the worst of the fates.
August 26, 2025 at 5:35 PM
iwsfh.bsky.social
#midlife #MiddleAge
My heroes, such as they were - the people I thought had it all figured out - were calm, cool and collected. Monkish artists, going in to go out, going out to go in. They were at ease, free of demons, so it seemed, although on closer inspection, a look at life not the art, things were often very different. Alcoholism, poverty, sexual misconduct, self-loathing, selfishness, timidity, jealousy, madness and in many cases early death having followed a trail of tears and suffering, with more left in their wake. Not a way of being or series of events one would wish upon a child. There was consensual reality, then whatever happened within my skin and skull, and I was in thrall to the latter.
August 26, 2025 at 5:32 PM
iwsfh.bsky.social
#midlife #MiddleAge
I drink less alcohol, more herbal tea, to calm my nerves and not fuck up, not waste time, not become even more of a wreck. Above all I cling to the belief there’s another story to be told, and perhaps I’ll live to tell it.
August 22, 2025 at 6:42 AM
iwsfh.bsky.social
I practiced nothing, so mastered nothing beyond being alone with myself.

#midlife #MiddleAge
August 22, 2025 at 6:41 AM
iwsfh.bsky.social
I’ll be forgotten well before I’m dead.

#midlife #MiddleAge
August 22, 2025 at 6:41 AM
iwsfh.bsky.social
#midlife #MiddleAge
I’m not sure what I expected by rejecting the world, other than to have the world reject me. As a teenager reality was mediated by books and music, film and TV, with the latter rare distractions, the former something I fell into with headphones and a library card. Easy ways of escape, and modeling, for the most part, emotions, not lifestyles. And then the lives I did experience on the page were mostly poor, or so it seemed, and mainly bohemian or wretched, but certainly, and above all, self-obsessed. This was the model I molded myself on, or the one that fit best my nature. To explore the world inside to untangle the knot of the being one was born and bullied into. To escape. To live in an eternal spring and summer. To feel free. To be happy. Now for me this meant going inward and outward, away from home and convention, but also from society, from hope, from ambition, from connections, from the world. And so I found myself at a certain age with nothing - no friends, no acquaintances, no coworkers, no achievements, no abilities, no money, no past, no present and no future, but still inescapably me, having lived a life of indulgence, sloth and lucky escapes, or flash memories, strange pleasures and madness away from the crowd. A life both real and unreal, lived fully and barely even started.
August 21, 2025 at 4:08 AM
iwsfh.bsky.social
Of course I’m utterly ordinary, leading an uneventful life in a quiet town in a European backwater, with nothing interesting to say, nothing interesting to do, just biding my time until there’s none left, almost none,...

1/2
August 11, 2025 at 9:32 AM
iwsfh.bsky.social
Over time the promise faded, but not before it shamed you.

#midlife #MiddleAge
August 1, 2025 at 2:46 PM
iwsfh.bsky.social
A youth spent living young dreams, and now the dreams of middle age. A safe home. A pension. Teeth and legs that work. A mind and life that haven't been wasted.

Outside, the seasons continue.

#midlife #MiddleAge
August 1, 2025 at 2:45 PM
iwsfh.bsky.social
My life is falling apart, and so is my home, but inside I make the best of things.

#midlife #MiddleAge
July 31, 2025 at 12:07 PM
iwsfh.bsky.social
When I first found out about Daoism / Zen I wanted that emptiness and clarity, the ability to live both in the moment and out of time, a feeling I chased forever after.

1/3
July 31, 2025 at 12:07 PM
iwsfh.bsky.social
The guilt at having done nothing.

#midlife #MiddleAge
July 31, 2025 at 12:06 PM
iwsfh.bsky.social
I was a shallow young man who thought in terms of cool and uncool, good-looking and ugly, a general mess who brought more pain into the world than joy. Life was a very serious business, but I was already throwing it away.

#midlife #MiddleAge
July 14, 2025 at 1:09 PM
iwsfh.bsky.social
I was entitled, thought the world owed me a life, or at least a living, and so was lazy, self-indulgent and self-satisfied, going near endlessly in, rarely looking out, simply playing with myself and not others.

1/2
July 14, 2025 at 1:09 PM
iwsfh.bsky.social
Doing nothing compounds.

#midlife #MiddleAge
July 4, 2025 at 3:59 PM
iwsfh.bsky.social
Yet it's never too late to start over in this line of work. The important thing is just to keep healthy, sane and solvent.

#midlife #MiddleAge
July 4, 2025 at 3:59 PM
iwsfh.bsky.social
You get this far through life and it's clear that others have done it, are doing it, and will continue to do it, so much better. Less alcohol, sure, and more money, by which I also mean more focus and effort and drive from even a young age.

1/3

#midlife #MiddleAge
July 2, 2025 at 1:41 PM
iwsfh.bsky.social
The idea is to have fun, right? A good time, and to help others have a good time, too?

It's so simple, and yet I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.

#midlife #MiddleAge
July 2, 2025 at 1:39 PM
iwsfh.bsky.social
The point of being very rich is to have whatever you want, whenever you want it. Products, services, and the obedience of others, as well as the minimization of all possible delays and annoyances.

1/3

#midlife #MiddleAge
June 28, 2025 at 5:40 PM