random navel gazing

I've spent the last few weeks (months) going around in some kind of three dimensional figure-8.  Not quite a spiral, more just up and down winding up in the same places but different. It started out with a low simmer of anxiety over trying to have kids and not being terribly successful with it. We've not quite given up, but have put a lid on things, if I don't manage to get pregnant we're going to pull the plug. It was a bit of a rough ride coming to that decision, and the aftermath has been interesting.

The biggest part about this that I'm having trouble with is figuring out what to do with the rest of my time. At first it was a crush of "this is what I've spent my whole life gearing up for, what do I do now?" But I'm starting to come around on that front. I'm not entirely sure that I'm  being honest about this. Yes, I've been generally heading in that direction but it's possible that this is yet another in a series of excuses about how I'm trying to get ready for some big thing, about to start down a path, but it's really an excuse to not actually *do* anything now.

I felt like I'd lost some central thread, some major project that was going to give meaning to my life and be the thing I did that would be remembered. What was the point of collecting all this information if I wasn't going to pass it on? And then I read Herman Hess's "Siddhartha" after it had been sitting on my Kindle for quite a while. Hess points out that no matter how much you know, even if you've achieved "enlightenment", that knowledge is yours, and it was found by your own experience and you can't really pass that along because the things that lead you to your own understanding are not the things that will lead others to theirs. Mulling this over on the bus yesterday, vacillating between tears because I have no dreams left and admonitions about how this crisis of self is narcissistic wanking, I've circled back around to a few ideas. Yes, it is possible that the never ending journey to find one's essential self is a project born of Berkley trust-fund hippies who have more time than useful work on their hands, that personal empowerment retreats and walking on coals are all one big distraction from the unseemly truth that most people in the world have to actually work for a living, and yes, it's not necessarily fun or fulfilling, but they do it because it needs to get done. there was never some idyllic time when living off the land and being connected to nature was a magical, peaceful time that we need to get back to so we can commune with the spirits. Life has always been hard, nature kills us all the time and there's a huge difference between choosing to grow a victory garden with some chickens and watching your family starve because something went wrong with the crops that year. One is a hobby, albeit a useful one with real economic and ecological impacts, and the other is just another kind of work, great some days, but just that thing you have to do to survive all the rest of the days. whether I'm behind a plough or a keyboard, the net effect of having to spend a portion of my life doing things i don't really want to, but need to anyway is the same.

I have a job, it's not a magical, wish granting job, but it's a good job that I enjoy for the most part, I can do it, I get decent perks and give or take a few dollars, it's as reasonable a position that I'd find anywhere else at this time. I've tried a lot of jobs for many reasons, and no matter how much I loved or hated it, there were days I had fun and days I'd really rather have stayed in bed. After the co-op closed down, I'd pretty much exhausted the list of things I wanted to do without additional schooling, and while I'm in a bit of a holding pattern, I'm not sure that's such a bad place to be. To start, I *have* a job, which is no mean trick these days. I also have no idea what else I'd rather be doing right now. I could come up with another long-term plan, but I'm not unconvinced that wouldn't just be another stalling tactic to avoid making the most of what I have right now in front of me.

The thing I'm afraid of is becoming what i see so much around me, people who go to work to get money to go to the same bars and clubs on the weekends to get drunk and have the same embarrassing adventures, making the same mistakes and lamenting them loudly and publicly year after year. I'm afraid that if I settle into the present, I'll get stuck in a rut and keep doing the same things over and over and years will pass without anything real happening.  I'm starting to realize that perhaps there's a middle ground between "Office Space - Goth Edition" and a grand, unifying life that changes the world. I'm thinking, a job that doesn't suck, and maybe some projects that give me goals and things to do and make me happy.

I can't help but notice that when people have come to me for advice, I give the best I've got and maybe some subtle shift happens but mostly they keep doing things the way they were anyway. We all have to make a living and eat and wash clothes and bathe and get places, the differences between your life and mine are primarily in the subtle shifts. You have a different car, eat different foods, but most of you still go to a store to get it. maybe I'm focusing too much on validating my existence with outside measures, and the point of it all is really to do the things that make me happy and interested, so that I am happy and interested, and whatever effect that does or doesn't have on the outside world is beside the point. I'm not talking about becoming a sociopath, pursuing my happiness at the expense of others', but of not worrying about whether i make an impact on the world, and instead turning to cultivate the things inside me that might be useful for that. And if they're not, at least I was doing something that was meaningful to me.