I've been toying with an eventual move back to London.

I had to move out a few years back, it was never my choice, and I was ripped away from my home, my friends, and the life I'd built there over a decade. It sucked, but a lot of things were going whirligig in my life back then and the suckiness of it just got subsumed into the suckiness of everything else. Now I'm in a position to think of moving back down and...

I've been toying with an eventual move back to London, rather than an eventual move over to Manchester. Because staying in Sheffield is never a plan, because being in Sheffield was never anything I wanted and isn't anything I want.

And you'd think this would be easy, right? Just sit down and list the pros and cons and come to a tidy rational conclusion.

The thing is, all these pros and cons, they all tie in to what I want. And I know this 'I'. It's the self that Buddha said is an illusion, that neurophilosophers say is a trick of the brain; it's the ego that warps the weave of the world so all lines point to its imagined centre, that makes up a story then says the story is the most important thing in the world, and it is responsible for so much suffering on an individual level and - these days - horrific ecological devastation as we power a global civiliation on greed and material consumption devoted to fulfilling its never-ending desires. It's the self which always, always wants - which craves, which desires, which runs from the world to other worlds. It's the self which continually trades today for promises and fears of tomorrows which never come, or regrets and reminisces for yesterdays which never were.

I know this might all seem a bit heavy for thoughts on where to get a flat, but you see it's all tied up in the same parcel. Wherever I go, I'll be, and I'll be as content or otherwise as I am right here, right now. Beyond a basic level of human need, trying to improve your condition or make yourself happier by changing your material circumstances or aquiring posessions is like trying to slake thirst by drinking salt water. And so many people pay lip service to this but I feel like I'm finally beginning to get it, that I look at the world we've build and the lives we lead and it's fucking insane. Legitimately, pathologically delusional in a way which is cripplingly bad for how we thrive as human beings.

I will never stop craving. But I am bigger than that self, maybe so much bigger than that self that I'm really nothing. So ultimately it doesn't matter. All the truly, crucially important things in life, in my life, are things I have little to no control over; and in the end everything and everyone I love will be taken from me. Life is huge, this world is huge.

This is rambling, I know - so many if my thoughts these days are rambling, newly-formed things still finding their legs. Maybe I will move back to London, I miss my friends, I really miss my friends. But we're all under the same sky.