since i haven't posted in forever here's an excerpt from one of my babbling emails ...

"... I know about the old, boring, uninteresting, uncreative, crappy career angle, it's why people have midlife crisises and why otherwise unsleazy men cheat all the time, (that is if there are any unsleazy men).
Society has been set up to bore us to death, we have to try to keep challenging ourselves, I know on the one hand, my kids keep part of me on my toes, but they help to kill another part of me, a similar part that is killed by straight jobs, marriage, taxes, worrying about retirement, fear of death, etc., the freak, not just the inner child but the actualized and free adult that many of us were on the verge of attaining before our decadently extended adolescence forcibly came to it's end either by love, procreation, or being sick of sharing crappy apartments with strangers and not having enough money to go on vacation without running up credit card debt ... right now at best I can keep in touch with this person who I had planned to become by being a weekend psychic warrior, basically exposing myself to people on the street, no I meant to say exposing myself to either challenging or spiritually uplifting art (like Forest Gump and that wonderful artist that paints those quaint scenes of overly decorated snow covered houses, tchk-chk-BOOM, wall full of brains), basically anything to get you outside of yourself and your grind that will still allow you to get back into it in a timely manner, so no work is missed or bills paid late, with the hope that these respites will allow you to keep that part of you alive that you wish to flourish at some point in the future no matter how unforeseeable that future is. Obviously exercise, yoga, taichi and mediation are all probably more effective ways of doing the same thing.

This reminds me of something I read about some point in the distant past in some region of India where such high numbers of young men were devoting themselves to spiritual studies that it was hurting the economy. This prompted "them" I guess them that come up with the grand ideas that society is based on to decide that men should spend their first 20 years devoted to learning, both the secular and spiritual, their next 20 years devoted to operating in the secular and physical world, ie. making money and making a babies, and the next 20, which at that time for most I'm sure meant the rest of their lives, living as a spiritual being, be it a wandering aesthetic, a monk, etc.
and basically now that applies to both men and women, and we are all in the suck it up and deal with it stage of our lives, and we haven't had the proper spiritual training to get through this stage, we just have to find a way to keep one foot out of the rut so we can keep it on the proverbial Path."