Just a little Monday Moring navel gazing

I was twenty four when I moved to Seattle. I didn't have much. A job in a movie theater and a small apartment. My roommate wasn't moving up for a couple months. That summer I read, "Lolita" and "Great Expectations" and "One Hundred Years of Solitude."
Now books longer than 400 pages intimidate me, like they are asking too much of me.
There is a lot about being young that I don't miss. Lots of uncertainty,insecurity, false steps. None of that has gone away, but I have a better handle on things. I know that rough patches come and go. I've picked up some tricks along the road.
Oh, but the time to read big books. To sink into a project, like sinking in warm mud up to your neck. To think about some little thing for hours. To dwell with an idea for weeks at a time.
On the surface, this seems a ridiculous thing for me to get weepy eyed about. What do I have to complain about? It sure looks like I have plenty of time and space. But here's the thing: a free hour squeezed between two commitments is not the same as a free hour sitting between two other free hours. And four hours added up over the day isn't four hours straight. It's hard to explain why being in a crowded coffee shop is being alone in a way that just being in another room in the apartment is not, even when the door is closed.
Sometimes it's easier to be creative while you're doing a data entry job than it is to sit unoccupied physically, but worrying.
When I was twenty-one I hitchhiked around Australia for two months with only what I had on my back. Once in college I had so few belongings I was able to move from one house to another on foot.
Here is where I must stop and scold myself. Today I long to be so unencumbered. But back then, all I wished for was more. Not, of course, more tangible stuff, but the stuff of life: accomplishments, attachments, experiences. Never dreaming that those treasures would sometimes feel like a burden.
I don't really want to live in a small white room with only a bed and a chair. And I know that a rhythmic, mindless task is soothing for about a week and a half before it becomes oppressive. And I know that a time with no messages to return and no deadlines to meet soon becomes purposeless. And a world where you're not concerned about others, thinking about others, caring for others gets lonely.
But nostalgia has it's own warped logic.
A logic I'm going to have to shake if I'm going to move forward. To find some balance and some peace. Some midway point between not enough and too much.
I can do this.