Sunday, I watched a lot of television and I put a few things in a Smash Book. I'm sure I did a few other mundane things, but I honestly don't remember half of them, and the less mundane things I did are unmentionable.
After a restless Monday night, and tense morning, I was encouraged into a shopping quest Tuesday. Jeph and I have a potentially hot date tonight, and the plan was that I would find something awesome to wear. I fixated on one specific item, and spent about four hours driving all over the city in hopes of securing it. The sad thing--if I'd actually pulled the trigger faster on the store's website, I would have gotten the specific item I wanted without ever leaving the house--it sold out while I hemmed and hawed. Because of my uncertainty, I ended up settling for my third choice, and I didn't really accomplish anything else with my time.
As I sit here today, at nearly 11 a.m., I have bathed the dog and tended to one of her immediate health needs, but have otherwise accomplished nothing else.
I think it's perfectly acceptable to occasionally spend time doing nothing. I think it's even healthy. The problem? While I'm trying to be at rest, my brain is almost never at rest. And that has me thinking. Why do we worry so much about wasted time? And what does that even mean?
I remember during my college days that I was a woman obsessed--obsessed with finishing college and starting life. Time in school felt like a boulder around my neck. Things were never going to start until I could get through this one stage of life.
When I ultimately completed this level of "the game," I was immediately disappointed to figure out that finishing school didn't automatically translate to magically finding the path to the kind of success I sought. At the same time, I was starting a new stage of my personal life with Jeph.
As I looked forward to building a home with him, I picked up little knickknacks and housewares that I imagined we would both care about--things that would be the face of my home. My mom made fun of me. She told me that I was ridiculous for thinking that I could create some kind of fancy and perfect life with Jeph. She was enviously cruel. I was wasting my time dreaming.
I was raised to be focused. I was taught to work hard. I wasn't encouraged to dream big. I believed, and in many ways still do believe in the first two things, but I never bought into the last one. Unfortunately, focus and hard work aren't always enough to make dreams come true. Sometimes, you have to make the right connections with people, and you have to take giant leaps into the unknown. Being raised to focus, and taught to work hard doesn't always help you make connections, or give you courage to take risks.
Most of us feel pressure to "get it together," and pick a path quickly. If you don't have a purpose or a solid career, how are you going to survive? It's a little like "The Hunger Games," if you think about it.
I lost my second job out of college, and my fear of not "having it together" crushed me. I felt compelled to scramble and find my way. And I decided the way I had originally chosen must be wrong, since I had "failed." So, I decided to refocus, and find solid ground to stand on.
John Lennon said "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans." He was a smart man.
When giant things happen in your life, they change you. And I don't just mean emotionally, and sometimes physically. I think they may change your chemistry and what you are. What I could accept before is different from what I am willing to accept now. I know the same is true of people I care about, who have lived through life-altering events. I've watched that change occur in my closest friend.
I know about the fire that rages inside of me. I know about that annoying, and nagging part of me that quietly whispers "dream bigger." No matter how quiet that whisper is, it's never been quiet enough for me to escape. And at times, it is deafening.
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| Life is Timey Wimey. |
I envy the people I encounter who don't "have it together," either by choice, or by accident. I envy the freedom of not knowing what tomorrow will be like. I envy the option of picking up and moving halfway across the country, or even the world to take a chance at something at which I might be a complete failure. I envy those who are just starting out, because they have a chance to get it all right, even if that means sometimes getting it wrong. I envy people who "get it" before they lose it.
I don't think being focused and working hard has given me the balance in life that I'm looking for now. I have always mistaken balance for a choice between stability and feeding dreams. Stability always has won out over the deafening whisper of dreaming. Stability has become a synonym for fear in my life. I am fearful of what it would take to really feed my dreams.
I sit, and I think. In the moments when that whispering voice is the loudest, I try to focus on something else, and I try to believe that what I'm focusing on is more important and meaningful than the whispers and the dreams. I try to believe that I can apply my values and my fire to the things that are already a part of my life, instead of trying to find something new, or even trying to recapture the things I put away as if they were silly toys.
Meanwhile, my very best friend works harder than anyone I know, and constantly tries to "move the needle." Jeph pours every moment of his existence into acquiring the stable freedom to dream. He does this while I sit and think. Sometimes I wonder if the whispering voice that sometimes makes me want to go mad is so loud that he can't get away from it either.
I know that Jeph and I aren't the only ones our age, and maybe even a few years both directions, who have hit this place--this place where life finally has to mean something, and we finally have to be awake in our skin. I don't know how all of us who are in this "moment" got here, but I wonder if it is how we've used our time--how we've been successful in achieving our goals and plans in the time frame we foresaw, or how we have wasted our time on things that seemed more legitimate and real than what was in our hearts. It's as if we were too busy to seek our own souls.
It strikes me that Jeph often wakes up after nights of vivid dreams--usually nightmares. He often asks what I dream about, and most of the time, I can't remember. He works so hard to push the needle to get to dreams that don't terrorize him, and I sit and think to push my own dreams away--maybe because I'm too afraid they can never come true. And I in everything I don't do, I ensure that they won't.
John Lennon also said: "When I was five years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down 'happy.' They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life." This is what I someday hope to teach my own child, because it's the lesson I wish I had learned much earlier, when it was easier to turn the ship.
For now, there's a bag of laundry, a nearly finished scrapbook, and a skein of yarn within my reach. There's dust on the coffee table and stuff strewn about. There's a finished novel on the laptop I'm using, but I've barely done anything about it. There's a third of another novel here that I seem to be afraid of. There's a poem in the Notes app on my iPhone, that I wrote weeks ago but haven't shared, and the lines of at least two others in my mind that I haven't built upon.
Where does all of the time go?
Tired of Me--Live
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