The Book That Never Was

To give up on ambition.

I think "writing a book" was my earliest ambition. I had other dreams: a handsome adventurous husband (dark, maybe a war correspondent, so often absent); a delightful child (who would miss me when I died young as I always imagined dying in my thirties); a cottage, stone and thatched, with a trellis of climbing roses around the front door and a stone wall separating the rambunctious cottage garden from a seldom-used track; a horse who loved me; many other animals, wild and tame; friends who were thrillingly clever and some even a little glamorous. But the ambition was to be a writer. Of books that changed people's lives. Moving and powerful and intense. The Great Modern Novel. That was what I assumed. I just thought it was bound to happen.

There was an ambition to be an investigative journalist. A producer/director of great documentaries. A football journalist with the inside information. They never came to pass either.

And the ambition to return to academia and end up as a well-loved and respected tutor. Or to become a conservationist, admired for her fortitude, resilience and ability to get the work done.

To launch an inspired podcast that would be in the "we're listening to..." and "trending" lists everywhere.

FFS.

It's not hard to give up most of the ambitions, but the book one, that is tough.

And yet if I wanted to write a book, I'd be writing a book. Not blogging, not finessing papers for conferences that only a few people attend.

The problem with ambition is that to actually turn ambition into action takes either belief (in self or the ambition) or a leap of faith (that one can do it and that it's worth doing).

I have neither belief nor faith... or indeed the whatever-it-is that's required to make a leap of faith. Is that faith? Or the willingness to put faith in the possibility of faith? Whichever, I don't have it.

To live forever yearning for the something that matters and to feel that nothing matters. To live forever yearning to be someone who matters, when being someone who matters is reliant on believing that something matters.

Can you live "as if" something matters? I think people often do, and they are unwilling, an unwillingness that hardens into a concrete resistance, to delve into whether that "as if" has any standing in reality.

Can you live "as if" something matters while knowing, in heart and soul, that nothing does? Maybe. What does that take? Strength or whatever the reverse of cynicism is.

Which leads me to ask, how does the cynic live?

Maybe you have to believe that it doesn't matter that nothing matters. And so you may as well enjoy the ride. Is that a healthy attitude or the nadir of our times' selfishness?

I'm inclined to think the latter, but a nagging doubt makes me feel the former may be the case.

But I am constitutionally driven to seek meaning. And I simply haven't (can't?) find it.