From the Comments: Interregnum A to D

Sorry it took me so long to get back to this– current events got in the way.   Neuro made some points on a previous From the Comments, Inshallah, that I had to struggle to address in any logically coherent manner:

There are several ideas in your post that seem independent: a) an outdated website, b) one’s personal mythology, c) paradigms for how to take on life, d) a sub-optimal life or at least feeling it is.

Seems to me that the Interregnum is just about (d).

…I think you explained it well, I just don’t yet see the necessary connections between a-d. For example, it seems to me that one can have a personal mythology without having any “paradigms on how to judge and achieve…personal success and fulfillment.” And one can have both of those without happiness. I might be confused because, as I read it, a-d are mixed in your discussion as if they are all interchangeable, and that is not how I am thinking of them.

I view them not so much interchangeable as interrelated, and only independent of each other in the strictest sense of the term: that yes, it is possible (and sometimes appropriate, I suppose) to consider my problems in the light of only any given one.

The website, since its inception, has tended to be the truest expression of whatever’s going on with me at any given moment in time. That’s what it was designed to do. Everything that matters to me outs here eventually, one way or another– often in ways I’m not aware of until later. As such, it not only acts as an archival record of Where I Was At, but serves as a sort of crucible. The process of creating content for it does two things: it helps me clarify my thoughts and feelings and experiences, and it helps me place those thoughts and feelings and experiences into a structure where I can make sense of them, and not feel like they’re all ultimately pointless. That structure is what I refer to when I say “mythology”. Is that semantically accurate? Maybe not. But it always seems to wind up involving or invoking gods and angels and kings and demons and faeries and muses and archetypes and a lot of other things that are dear to my heart, things that occupy places in what people traditionally call Mythologies. So that’s what I call it.

Similarly, my personal mythology and my paradigms for how to take on life have always seemed to evolve together and inform each other. I suppose it’s possible to have one without the other. I never seem to. Some kind of storytelling always springs out of the ground where I step; if that’s not happening, it usually (if not always) turns out I’m stepping in a bad direction for me, or failing to accomplish anything meaningful.  And things feel wrong.

Also, a personal mythology that doesn’t involve or at least influence your paradigms for how to take on life doesn’t seem to me to be much of a mythology.

So, to make it clearer for me, if tomorrow you woke up with a new mythology and new paradigms and your life was still suboptimal, would the Interregnum be over?

Yes, I think so. Because then even though things sucked, I wouldn’t feel like the whole Earth was a wash and that I was just kicking around in the ruins waiting for the Sun to go out. I’d have a path, a way to move forward. At the best that would end it; at the worst that would number its days.

Or, alternately, if your life suddenly became optimal though you had no new paradigms or mythology, would the Interregnum still be in effect?

Yes– but in line with what I said above, I can all but guarantee that if my life did become optimal, something new would evolve in my mythology to parallel it, somewhere in the process of that happening– because that’s the way my mind and imagination work. (Some people would say that’s the way the World and the Universe work; I would love to say that, but I don’t dare claim the authority. :) ) And whatever that new evolution would be would also probably kill or displace the Interregnum.

I hope that answers more questions than it raises.