Looking In

Was glancing through my journal of this date fifteen years ago and came across this very odd bit of self-communing:

Reflected today on some of the motivating factors behind my feelings about work-related issues. Did not like what I saw but realised that was why it was important to look. I thought I had achieved some distance on this. But I haven't. These issues seem related in some sense to the money issues above. I don't know quite how but they both seem related to unsurfaced anxieties. I think I'm open to exploring these pressures, if that's the right word, in an open-ended way - but there's another part of me that says be stoical. Take the pressure and allow it to release grace of a kind. Rise above this. This is nothing compared to the real anxieties that beset some folk. And that's so obviously true. I can forget these hardly existent problems quite easily, naturally. But is there some underlying trouble that I'm closing my eyes to, which it would be fruitful, profitable to live with, walk among, become conversant with?

I suppose I'd better say why I found this so odd. Two reasons. The first is that I have no idea at all what 'work-related issues' were on my mind all those years ago. These days such 'issues' simply don't exist, at least not in the oddly intense way they appear to have been affecting my (somewhat) younger self. (Though the concerns about the green stuff being hinted at have not exactly disappeared, I must say.) The second is that I seem to have abandoned the peculiarly introverted style of the passage above a long time ago to the extent that I hardly recognise it as something I was once capable of.

I'm all for reflection, but sometimes you can gaze too deeply inwards.