Materialism

These days when I sit before the monitor trying to blog I am always struck by a sense of emptiness, as though there's nothing worth saying here. Why do I bother blogging? This is not a private journal, and yet I feel the urge the pour out my deepest, darkest troubles onto the world. Isn't that sheer exhibitionism? Yet I take some comfort in the fact that no one reads my blog anymore, so there is a measure of privacy, even if I'm just trying to delude myself.

What to say though? I just feel empty and shallow these days. I've felt this way before, years back in school. It's the feeling I get when I realise my happiness depends on nothing more than the material, like the next time I book out, or my next meeting with friends, shopping, eating, watching a movie. I enjoy all these things, but nowadays I sense they've gotten too much of a hold on me, to the extent that I wonder sometimes about the day I finally ORD. When all this trouble, the thorn in my neck for two years, is gone, will I just feel empty and rootless? Because as of now, NS provides a counterpoint to my material happiness, the black to my white. How then will I know beauty if I live on a bed of roses? At such a point I usually convince myself that the gloom that's descended on me is linked much closer to NS than just my shallow materialism, and that my ORD will not see a dying out of euphoria a few days after it.

And yet I cannot ignore what I just called my shallow materialism. Shallow, ha. To think I would call myself that. Maybe not exactly shallow. Materialistic more like it. Shallowness would imply an inability to see the emptiness, an inability to notice the deep end a few metres beyond the bathing pool. But how? How to shake this off? It's linked, I know deep down it is, to my increasing detachment from the spiritual life. And what plagues me most is my inertia, my sheer laziness to get up and do something about it. Writing does not help in practical action here. Maybe writing clarifies things, brings thought into focus, but it certainly does not dispel sloth. Prayer? You know alot of times I feel my prayers are mere words without actions, a temporary balm to appease a vengeful deity. Completely erroneous of me I know, but these are the sort of thought errors I am liable to fall into without rigorous correction time and time again. My God is both Saviour and Lord, the Righteous Judge who also stands as my Advocate in heaven. I need to bring back that balance in my life. And yet words without thoughts never to heaven go.