May 18, 2018
I’m going to be super honest up front and fess up to that post title being a bit misleading. My schedule currently is shit, AND I have little idea what I am doing. But, those are two separate ideas. My schedule is currently shit, but not BECAUSE I have little idea what I am doing.
As is par for my current course, the past seven months have brought about exponential amounts of change. I quit a seriously well paying job with copious amounts of benefits just because I hated it (well, that and he said our family finances could handle it and I always trust him). I found myself unemployed (yes, I know being the supportive partner, primary caregiver of children, and general house CEO is a job – you know what I mean) for the first time since I was 14.
That, in itself, is enough. There’s more obviously. But
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July 16, 2018
But, once again, I have no idea where I was going with that little revelation up there. I can’t for the life of me remember what little gem I had stumbled upon in my own brain that compelled me to the keyboard. Neither can I remember the fact of life that took me from it. Sitting here this morning on this back porch, I have the most wonderful peace of realization that what I do know is that I do not care.
It isn’t that I don’t care to remember what the things were or that events in my normal day to day aren’t important to me – they obviously are. It is simply that what I do remember of that small bit of writing time is the feeling of listlessness. The feeling, once again of being too much and not enough. That in my being there was something purposeful and I in my inability was not living up to the occasion and the occasion was important.
Here, on this back porch, I realize that none of those things are true and that is a better insight than anything I had discovered on that day. Understand I am appreciative of that insight, whatever it was as it, no doubt, was a piece of the path. And there is a small part of the writer in me that wishes I had the words from then if only to have a better view of the picture now. But not so much that it disturbs me. And that is progress.
There are those who are always one goal post away from “being there.” A job, house, a spouse, a goal – then, then they can experience happy, there they can find joy. Until then, they are head down, easily agitated, and sacrificing the joy in the now for the joy in the future. Because joy doesn’t work in that way, the goal is accomplished and they don’t find what they are looking for. Instead of adjusting their understanding of joy, they create another goal post. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.
There is me. While this cycle is not one I typically find myself caught in, I have recently wrenched myself out of a small bout with it. It was abstract so I didn’t recognize it at first. But I had created two goal posts in my brain – normalcy and worthiness. If I could achieve those two things, then I could relax just a bit.
Normalcy and worthiness. At least I picked small things, amirite?
In my brain, I had convinced myself that those around me deserved these things. They deserved consistency, they deserved stability, they deserved a person that could create these things for them and present them as whole and easy. My life is so utterly amazing, I needed to do these things to be worthy of the love I receive. I needed to be good enough to deserve this life, to deserve the love.
In my appreciation of the wonderful, I had forgotten to keep perspective of the journey. And the journey is only “normal” in that we are all on one, both with ourselves and with those we love. And worthiness? That’s just like joy. It comes from within not from without.