Collapse of the 4th corner

What is this new feeling? And what are its roots?
I've been having feelings of contentment on and off for the past few months, but now there is also a budding of a sort of positive, active attitude towards the world. It is as if for a long time - perhaps the whole of my adult life - I have moved along a passive continuumm of resistance/acceptance, avoidance/tolerance. The best I could hope for was to avoid embarassment when with people and learn to make the best of my solitude. I was an old man in a hut, hiding from visitors and gathering scraps dropped by strangers. Now I have a sense that I am growing younger and could leave the hut if I wanted.

The passive introvert. To me this shelled up life has always felt like the norm. People who eat life are a different species. I find it amazing that there are people who actually have an energy which drives them to do things, be with other people, seek things from the world not for solace but for fun. Could I metamorphose into such a person?

This recent feeling of openness began, I think, with a shift, which will I think be very difficult to describe, in my perception of my relationship to the world. Based on this new feeling, I get the impression that I normally regard the world as a kind of surface out there, a wall or canvas on which everything happens, and on which I could imagine myself plotting a pathway, painting in a little area which would be my life. There's me, slowly filling the next 30 or 40 years of a small area of space, painting it with a degree in Chinese or a year in Vietnam or whatever.

The change in perception is something like realizing - not just intellectually but at a deeper, more intuitive level - that the canvas is not out there. The canvas is created in the act of looking, and all looking is in fact a looking inwards.... When I think about myself it is always me in the world, an agent interacting with other people or slabs of experience, doing things which will bring happiness, pain, boredom, etc. But now I sensed that this me-external world dichotomy could be further dissolved by turning inwards, exploring the contents of my mind without any reference to an external world and my place in it, not as an excercise in discursive meditation but rather as a fishing for creative seeds that might give birth to a poem or picture. Hmm, is this just a convoluted way of saying I've rediscovered the dimension of creative self-expression that's been absent from my life for a long time? Well, maybe. So what. Fuck it. I need a drink....