only time

'Who can say
where the road goes
where the day flows
only time'

That Enya song has popped in my head several times as I have been winding down my life in London as I know it and looking ahead to this next chapter which has yet to be written... in more ways than one. Not only has it yet to be lived, it also has yet to be fully planned. That's okay I think - you know what they say - man plans, God laughs.

I've pondered on how these two realities can coexist: I seem to be going full speed ahead in reverse of the proverbial 'American dream,' by choice - I'm 31 years old, not in a committed relationship with a man, nor do I have any realistic prospects of children in the near future, I am leaving my well-paid corporate job for 6 months, I'm in the process of unwinding my home ownership status in America and putting all the things I own (on this side of the pond, anyway) in a 15 square foot storage unit in London... yet in many ways, I am on the road to being happier and more at peace from the inside than I've been in a long time.

As I was packing yesterday, trying to discard as much as possible, I came across one of the most influential paperbacks I have ever read. It's by Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead, and I don't care if it's 'just a paperback' and only would cost £6.99 to replace. It still made the cut. It was a treasured gift, is marked up by me from front to back and I'll never forget reading it for the first time and how relevant so much of it was to my life at that point.

There are a couple passages from that book that I read almost two years ago that pained me to read because they hit a nerve, and ever since I have been trying to figure out why. I even taped part of it to my closet wall for a while. As time goes on I'm learning that they bear a distinct relevance to the inverse relationship I just described between this unwinding process and my level of personal happiness.

"Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find an answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not even struggling for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion... a stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can't say about a single thing: 'This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me.' Then he wonders why he's unhappy. Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched. I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men."

“That’s the sort of thing I want you to understand. To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That’s what everybody does every hour of his life. If I ask you to keep your soul, would you understand why that is much harder?”