All experience is an arch

This is a road we travelled on a little while back. We decided to travel slightly South-East of Auckland. Click the image for a large version. It’s worth it!

Anyway, I was feeling really frustrated today, I guess this yes/no hot/cold Texas business has affected me more than I want to believe. I can literally feel the tension in my body. My nose started threatening to twitch again, something I am valiantly resisting. I used to suffer from a nervous twitch in high school which earned me the endearing nickname “hampster”.

I have started feeling listless again, because I feel a state of inertia setting in again and I don’t like it. My performance review is coming up and I have started to really consider my self-actualisation achievements. I realised: I want to learn new stuff, I want to grow! Tennyson said it better than I could, in one of my favourite poems Ullyses:

Yet all experience is an arch wherthrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make and end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

To follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
Words so beautiful, I want to cry! It appeals to the existentialist in all of us.