the view from above vs. the view from inside

How far can you go with things I wonder, how far is the farthest someone can get into anything.
I went swimming last night, and it felt different than it used to. Like I had never really gotten past the foyer of all that swimming can be. I guess I've always been that kind of person, someone who likes to look into doors, but so often gets lured away by the possibility of what's behind some other door. A dabbler, as I was once accused of being. I suppose part of my problem has always been a sense of wanting to visit before making any commitments. There just isn't enough time, there really isn't - to get into everything. Perhaps I have always felt I wanted an overview of things and people, a basis on which to make a decision about what to get into. And maybe I've finally gotten that overview, after trying so many pastimes, travelling to most of the continents, dating a respectable number of different people.
Because these days, I feel sort of differently. I want to push the wall back and back. I want to work at things. I never used to want to do that. Things came easily, and there were so many kinds of things to discover. But lately I feel like I want to push myself, to go far inside things. And I guess I have an idea of which things I want to do that with. It seems like up until now, I've been circling the world in a small jet plane, diving down sometimes, for brief interludes, trying to understand the pattern from above, trying to get how it all fits together, what it means, what there is. And its not that I want to stop exploring, I just feel like I'd like to start dropping from the sky like an arrow, wham, pierce the surface, and zoom, keep going in and in and in, even if I have to start paddling because my momentum dies out, keep going until like some animation I'm suddenly at the cellular level, with the guts of my chosen topic chugging and churning and whizzing, and its a whole massive new universe to explore and get intimate with. To work with instead of just visit.
And you know, I always thought it was just that nothing had pulled me close enough to it, that I hadn't found the right thing. But it wasn't that, I just wasn't ready. I hadn't gotten a handle on the big picture. Which isn't to say I've exactly figured out the meaning of life, but perhaps I know it now - which is an entirely different thing.