Been digging my pond. Two feet deep the earth turns into really hard clay and gravel. I'm having to use a pickaxe and really take hard swings to get anywhere. The shovel is all but useless. And I really feel physically good as a result. I sort of wish I could have lived in a world where such hard manual labor was a part of most days... I so like how it makes me feel. Occasionally I've tried to find exercise, weight lifting in particular, that successfully mimics it. But I haven't managed to do so. Weight lifting is too intense and too short. And spending hours on end just exercising, in order to achieve a physical effect is not so great. So much better if the exercise has some other purpose, if it's a part of real life, a necessity to survival, and/or something beautiful is getting built.

The video game Elder Scrolls: Oblivion has a middle earth setting. In some ways the game is truly a fail. I think they might have literally used 5 people total for all the voices. I think they may have a grand total of 4 tracks of repetitive music. And yet they have endless characters. And endless dungeons (which seem to just be repeated.) And the game can just go on and on and on. With annoying loading bars... And having to stand around and wait for your magic to repower so that you can heal yourself sufficiently.

Anyway, despite all the negatives there is just barely some kind of feeling of escape to this otherworld that is somehow enjoyable. Not sure what about it exactly it is. May just be a grass is always greener thing, that one forgets all the worries that would exist over there. The worries which get in the way of enjoying life, the same as they do over here.

There's something about the middle earth setting though where the worries disappear better. Something about life being more simplistic, thus having hopefully having less worries, while at the same time there still being plenty of mystery and plenty to hope for.

I think that's what it is, less worries and more hope. Somehow we think of middle earth and imagine less worries and more hope. Less worries perhaps because life seems more simplistic. More hope because of this great unknown out there with magic, etc.

In truth a relatively simplistic life doesn't necessarily mean one spends less time worrying. And tied into the hope part is that we imagine ourselves as some kind of special person. A hero. We don't imagine ourselves as Joe Schmoe getting killed by an orc while trying to take a crap in the woods.

Less worries, more hope.