The tale of a good book

Subject: The tale of the good book.

The business of going out has always been a dilemma to me. It's not that I am not at ease in other people's company, far from it since I am quite a gregarious soul but it's just that I am equally at home in my own company. When I look outside as I do now, the sun is shining and although it is cold it looks pleasant. Why then do I have no need to go out and be communicative.
Of course our lives are divided up into segments. Our childhood was filled with the whimsical, whilst our school years were infested with learning a curriculum some of which we liked and some we hated but all of it was suffused with the torment of being examined on what we had taken in. Then the long road of work, working in many jobs for many varied organisations some benign, some hard and cruel. We had to perform tasks for which, at times we were unsuited, both from a lack of temperament or a lack of technical  knowledge. We, if married had the weight of expectation on our shoulders and bills to pay we had to fit a template not of our own making but a societal one which at its sanctimonious best lays strict guidelines on who were were supposed to emulate. Just another task in our deficit prone life to navigate.
And now to paraphrase Frank Sinatra "the end is near". We have been let off the leash to forage for ourselves without any kind of third party judgement. The difficulty of sailing on a new tack, with only the rocks to aim for, is that one is in danger of glancing back over the course sailed and finding that it's hard to find a reason to wear sunscreen again Ones whole 'raison d'etre' was the hurly burly of work, of being a father and a husband and trying ones best to fit a role that you were, at best an amateur.
Finding the space again, to settle for silence and inactivity, with only the part of the mind engaged, is attractive whilst it's a bit overwhelming having to consider places and experiences which the brochure advertises as a 'must have'.
The influence of ones own persona, modified by need and which has slept for so long perhaps needs a proverbial stick to stir it back into life, but to what end. When we were young, driven by desire, not least that of chasing the opposite sex, the pavements led somewhere we thought might reveal fun but now, as a dodgy old observer, the trigger to get up and go is missing. The rationality of a single bed in some far flung hotel or the table for one forced to observe others warming to the chase, it all seems pretty meaningless when a good book, snug in my own warm bed fulfils most of my earthly desires these days.