Wealth of Experience

In my youth, I spent a lot of time steeped in the construct of experience - if there was something going on, I wanted to be at the heart of it, where the intensity was, where everything was raw, hardcore, no element rejected.
Now that I'm away from the cities, and living in a small rural town, it's another kind of intense experience - for example, as an adult, I've never lived for so long in one place, always moving, always changing position.
There's no real night life here, everything is quiet, conventional, and people concern themselves on a daily basis with nothing but the basic essential minutia of living - from planning their seemingly constant social engagements, to how many hours of sleep they got, to how they got to work that morning.....It's a whole new kind of living to me, sedate, steady and consistent, and not a whole lot of change. Artistically speaking, this is great - it's so far away from my personal comfort zone to be restricted, limited, faced with the same repetitions over and over again, nothing but the microcosm, only the base foundation of the every day, the mundane, the slower pace, the focus on domestic life. Coming from a background of constant living on the edge, the darker side of humanity, the focus on constantly moving to and fro, always the excitement, the flash, the drive, the hard line, always travelling from culture to culture - I feel more out of place, more foreign and more separated than ever before in my life. The life here is almost one dimensional, I have to dig deeper to find the world of fascination, of inspiration, I'm looking at the mundane and the conventional with a different light - while the folks that live here are either content with what is, or discontent with their boredom, I'm reveling in the static, the minute, the detail - because that's where the intensity is. It's so foreign, so normal, so unknown to me, and it bursts the bubbles of past experience and creates a depth of perspective..... I couldn't live here for the rest of my life, but for the time being, the transformation through limits is allowing a different kind of evolution for me as a person and an artist.
That's why I think it's amusing when people tell me that I need to get out, expand my horizons, experience something new - they don't realize that I already am.......