moving backwards

I was looking at apartments today (don't get any ideas) although I'm not sure where I intend to end up.  There are too many directions to know which one to go in or when to go there.  And there is always the questions.
It was funny however, because I think the last apartment I stayed in, the actual apartment on the river, where I dragged my kayak to the river through the sliding glass door is vacant and for rent.  If I moved in there, would I be moving backwards?  Would any place like that be moving backwards.  Me, who lives in mansions and who prepared a 40 million dollar claim today, should I, the most worn of the careworn, question moving backwards to a place where an earlier, care free me used to live with nothing and the whole world ahead of me.
Now, I am in the world, both waiting for the next wave of wealth, and clinging to the floatsom of the last one.
People are builders of things.  The book I'm listening to talks about the stone hand ax as the passport from Africa to the rest of the world.  It was a different place, where apartments didn't exist, where 40 million dollar claims did not exist, where mansions didn't exist.  Where the passport to the rest of the world was not a art laden small blue book, but was instead a piece of stone, designed to fit within ones grasp.
But everyone lives and everyone dies within a paradise of sorts, a paradise of life and death as they learn what language means and invent art and use a stone ax without a handle to carve out life.
I'm not doing well, I swam only 1700 yards tonight, I wouldn't make much of a survivor tonight.  I look at what I have to do and I am gratified and horrified by how little I have to do, how much I have met my obligations and now I only have to wait.  I am not much of a waiter.  I'm sure my ancestors had to spend a lot of time resharpening their tools, but they also had to wait a great deal.
And they died young and at one point in time, there were so few of them, that only coincidence and pieces of stone kept them alive so I could wonder about moving backwards and waiting for the next wave to overtake me before its too late..