I’d like to say I know when it started, and why it started, but I don’t. I think I’ve just always seen that its been there, that I was probably born that way, and that I probably couldn’t change it.

The other night I put up a post about going to Boys State, and a cherished friend of mine read it and responded with an email. Besides her own short reminisces on her State experience, she cut to the point and basically asked me, with compassion, “What happened to you?” My tone in that post, she said, was like the tone found in many other of my posts she’s read over the last year, weighted with acquiescence, defeat, rejection.

I have a few friends who have told me they understand it, and that they too experience something like I do, and they’ve offered some thoughts about it.

It’s probably because of your religion, I’ve heard. Religion does a lot of things to mess people up, but no- I think it was there long before I was swimming out into the deep end of my faith. In fact, my faith in a lot of ways helped me to make decent sense of it. It d a pretty good explanation, and offers some solace.

Well, you choose your life, I’ve heard others say. You are like you are largely because you choose it. You chose it. You are right, I respond. You are right, and I’ve made the choices I’ve made because that pull within me led to those choices. I chose what I saw and felt I ought to do- whether it was right or not. I did make every choice along the way. But choices come off of bad intel or faulty feelings, and they take you down those paths.

I don’t know.

I don’t know where it comes from.

Maybe my problem is that I am not spiritual enough, that I do not give enough credence to the spirits, good and ill, that coerce and bend the thoughts and plans and actions of people.

Or that I am not material enough, heeding the wonders of science and biology and engineering, chasing out the chemical answer to my many moments of mental or emotional dissonance.

Or that I am not stoic enough, ignoring the suggestions of emotion or sensation to hear the clear voice of intelligence and instinct within.

Or perhaps that there is some intellectual structure in my brain that needs to be cleared or collapsed and reconstructed, perhaps through linguistic reprogramming.

Change your cells. Change your thinking. Change your god. Change your diet. Change your residence.

Change your hair cut.

With the way events play out each day on the news, though, I am feeling pretty confident that how I feel- and how I have felt for a long time- about my life isn’t too far from how a lot of other people feel in how they connect and experience life.

Feeling different happens. Feeling outside happens. Feeling disconnected happens.

And maybe for some, it never quite goes away.

I at least appreciate the efforts of my faith to give that separation a source, and describing it as a natural condition. And offering answers to it- even if, existentially, my mind does not always climb over myself.

The world spins on a tilted axis.*

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*As do most planets, each spinning “a little off” from a fully perpendicular axis. This tilted effect is called “obliquity”.

And economist John Kay uses the same term, “obliquity” to describe how the acheivement of some goals, or the accomplishment of some happinesses in life product of not chasing them directly, but rather securing them as a by-product of not chasing them directly.