No curse of man is greater than his capacity to imagine what might have been. Coming to terms with life’s disappointments is a sign of sanity. For me (and this is a topic that can only be about me — no solipsism intended) the nagging sense of failure, at coming up short, is the source not of grief but of torporous isolation. To be saddened by a loss would be a positive emotion. To be paralyzed by the lingering sensation that the succession of choices that one has made has led to this… to nothing is a vacuous hole that threatens to consume all that remains of one’s identity, hope and pleasure in life.

Sometime back in the early 80′s, when all those choices were yet to be, I wrote of disappointment. My intuition that I had been set up by someone else’s expectations and that my failure was most acute in the light of a glowing hope of potential that had been lit within me from a tender age, inflamed my hatred at that generation, that parent that had created such hopes and fantasies. That hatred that burned so hot in my twenties, was diligently suppressed. Conformity and the promise of its rewards would mitigate the frustration of mediocrity. And so it did for nearly two decades.

When the dreams of youth die (and there can be no dreams of old age) then I must face myself and reject that counterfactual life that never was and never will be. To embrace mediocrity and loneliness: that is the essence of acceptance.