Stillness

I'm sitting here at two in the morning in the stillness of somebody else's home, living in borrowed space with only a backpack's worth of belongings. It makes me wonder about what life is actually all about. That sounds trite I know, and I could get all-uber spiritual on you just to prove that I can, but that's not really the point of what I'm saying.

The point is that I can spend time and money 'building' a life for myself, kitting myself out with everything I think I need, equiping myself to be, or at least seem, an interesting well-rounded individaul, and to live the kind of life that I want. But then I'm sitting here without even a bed (admittedly with the laptop) and I'm happier here than at my house, in my room with all my 'stuff'. So what is life? I talked about 'building' a life, but so much of that is surely just peripheral? And how much of that peripheral 'stuff' is just there to make me look like I have an interesting life, and to express what kind of a person I am? When all that is removed, what really defines me, and makes my life good or bad?

There's nothing quite like sitting in the stillness, realising that you're actually happier without that houseful of moderately expensive junk, to qwell those materialistic urges and make me ponder the big questions, such as what my life really boils down to, and what I really want to spend my time doing with it.

I'm going to Kenya for a month this summer for my course, it'll be my first time out of Europe and two of those weeks will be spent with most likely just a handful of us students doing what we want. We're staying in mudhuts. It's always been my dream to get 'out there' and experience the world, I guess after this summer I'll have a slightly better notion as to whether I can handle it or not.

How can I know what I'm capable of if I've never set foot out of the box?