Maybe when you first started building the life you wanted, you left so much room for what might happen, you started losing sight of what was happening.
While you're in it, life seems epic, fiery, unpredictable. Once you have some distance from it, everything seems to shrink until it's almost out of focus.
Koinophobia.
When you look back over your life or try to put it down on paper, you can see more of it now than ever before. And yet it seems somehow diminished. Humble. Almost quaint.
You begin scanning your life, looking for something interesting, beautiful. You see an ordinary house, on an ordinary street. It looks smaller than you remember. You once had wild dreams and obstacles and risks looming all around you. But now they look smaller too. You remember giants, goddesses and villains.
Now all you see is ordinary people assembled in their tiny classrooms and workspaces. Each of us moving around in little steps like tokens on a gameboard. No matter how many times you roll the dice, there's always these little moments here and there. Do a little work, take a little rest, make a little friend, throw a little party, feel a little boredom, have a little rebellion.
There are so many of these token moments that are supposed to represent some other thing. And you keep adding them all up. As if there was something you forgot to count. Some stash of glory fell off the back of the truck.
And you may adore the life you have for everything it is. You know it isn't groundbreaking. You wouldn't change a thing. Maybe when you first started building the life you wanted, you left so much room for what might happen, you started losing sight of what was happening.
Or maybe you were never in it, to begin with. As if you knew even then that this wasn't the world you expected. A world so low and common you tried to keep your distance, floating somewhere above where nobody else could look down in this life you built, nobody else but you.
Source:
Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
Koinophobia: The Fear that You've Lived an Ordinary Life