When I was a teenager, I didn't want to succeed in life, in the sense of "climbing the ladders of socioeconomical advance". I wanted to escape the whole stuff, maybe to retire in a zen-buddhist monastry, or to become an isolated hermit. And still, I felt that both of those escape plans would require money to make them come true. So it is a trap. "FIrst sell your soul to earn money, only then you can use that money to regain your soul. Alas, the system is so built that it is hard to earn that much money, so it is likely to spend the rest of your life in the first phase, constantly trying to earn some money and dreaming about something else - but that *something else* never comes..."

Yeah, that kind of feeling of being trapped is depressing and paralyzing. I guess you are talking about that kind of feeling of inner paralyzis - it is easy to invent ideas to do, but when it comes the time to actually make those things, there is just an empty feeling and no inspiration to actually work for ones own ideas. Or, short moments of inspiration, and then about any little thing swings the mood back to freezing... When I was still living with my parents, in my room I pinned a card with a proverb in Russian - roughly translated it said: "Talk less, do more" - to remind me that life is not that much about plans and ideas, but more about the actual energy of carrying out those ideas.

Now, after all these years, I'm happy to be able to sip some brandy sitting in an oak at my yard. I'm still working with the same fundamental questions - trying to recover more and more of my inner inspiration and energy, trying to find a balance between my own ideas and the demands of the (post)modern society. And, one of the central inspirations for writing this blog is to keep up the spirit - don't give up, find what ever courage to walk through the dark times, as behind any corner a secret door might be hidden, opening up unpredictable new possibilities.

Life is an adventure, sometimes hard, sometimes easier.