experimental idleness

I am sitting here, late in the evening. Although I have a flat now - not a pretty one, but one that does the job - I have no internet connection there, thus I feel removed from the world and have to download everything I need before I go home. And I love this place at night, no one in it, just the gentle humming of the photocopier and the occasional voice of a Chinese neighbour telling her kid off. Chinatown is an odd place where to live, yet it feels so perfect in this alien city. Being surrounded by people who speak and write a language so incomprehensible to me makes me feel at home in this city, where those who speak my language are the ones I mostly don't understand. Nothing personal. The gap is just too wide. The habits have hardened. The ideas are set and we all think, underneath, we are right and the others are wrong. There is very little place for sympathy at this time of my life. I don't feel as passionate as when I was 20, and I don't feel as wise as when I will be 60. I am caught in a limbo of experimental idleness, content with what my brain has accomplished so far, rarely willing to be pushed out of my ideological comfort zone. Do I really know what I want? Do I really know what I believe? Does it matter, in fact? Can a sense of infinite possibility co-exist with a sense of finite accomplishment? If it can, 35 years is the perfect age when to feel this strange contraddiciton.