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need to succeed My mood today wasn't quite as positive as it had been yesterday, but optimism is something that tends to leave me fairly quickly. Nothing awful happened to trigger this change, but at the same time a depressing reality crept back into my thoughts. Once again I've been thinking that my moment to shine in life has come and gone. The thought that I'll be stuck forever at a job that alternately bores and angers me has gotten stronger. My means of escape will never appear and I'll just sink lower and lower into an emotional quagmire of my own creation. Okay. I seem to have reached a point of exaggeration, but I do have doubts about my future. I am not getting younger and the older that I get I know that my chance to succeed gets less and less. When I say succeed making large amounts of money isn't my target. Becoming independently wealthy is probably not going to happen to me and I can accept that fact. By succeed I mean finding a place in the world that suits me, if that makes sense. Joseph Campbell referred to this idea as following one's bliss. Without meaning to sound too new age or quasi mystical, I guess I have yet to find that path. Maybe since this is the end of the year, I've felt the need to reexamine things in my life. Plus without the added responsibility of school, I have a lot of free time to just sit and ponder what I have and haven’t done this past year. Obviously some things in my life are just fine and as boring as it might seem I am going to list them starting with work. Along the way I'll also point out the negative parts of my life and what I hope to do to correct them if I can. Despite the lack of interest in my job, it does pay the bills and the three day weekends make it even more tolerable. Now with the craziness of the holiday season still hovering things have been even more quiet there and has kept my complaining to a minimum. As to how well I make it through January remains to be seen. Originally I had planned on being in New Zealand for most of the month, but that isn't going to happen anymore. I still don't define my life by what I do for living. I always saw that as a sad way to view one’s life. Who I am as a person has much more to do what with what I say and think not what with what fills my checking account. Now maybe if I were a painter or a writer than yes I would see my job as being my life and not something that I do as a means of surviving. Some time ago I said that I feel as though I am wasting my life at my job and there are days where that still holds true. It says little to me on an intellectual level and I wish that I had somewhere where I could talk about things that interest me. I’m not saying that I am the smartest person in the world. I just wish that there was something in my life that made me think. Of course this is why I went back to school in the first place. The contrast between school and work was amazing. At school people talked about things that interested me and I learned something new every time that I was there. When I was there I felt alive. Plus I met new people. Work to me has a way of crushing a person socially. A person can easily let their circle of friends become nothing more than the people that they see at work and that is something that I never want to happen to me. I want and need a larger perspective on life than the one offered by a company. I am often surprised at how little people in the computer field know about things that are not computer related. Sometimes the stereotype is sadly true. Computers are their life and they have little time for anything else except maybe sports. Another plus in my life would be that fact that I’ve been a homeowner for over a year. My place may not be a mansion surrounded by hundreds of acres of trees, but it is still mine and that gives me a feeling that is hard to describe. Pride wouldn't be right, but I can't think of a better word. I guess what I am wondering is what do I do next? Most people seem to follow the general rules of life as they are laid out in the board game. Boy meets girl and they get married. Naturally this leads to children. Then the focus in life changes to raising them. Then once the children are grown and parents themselves, the motivation changes again. Finally after failing health there is death. Game over. Well, the only peg in my car is me and I don’t think that I am going to fill the other spots any time soon. Six hundred words later I'm not sure what my point was when I started writing. I guess that even though I've lived my entire life in Wisconsin I still don't see myself as a typical midwestern person. I can't see myself married with two children and driving a mini van to work. That just isn't me yet that seems to be the direction that most people seem to choose or say that they want. Am I missing something here? Then I start to wonder would I be better living somewhere else? Do I need to get outside of Western culture entirely? Then I remember that I appreciate things like indoor plumbing and electricity. I may rail against suburbanite culture, but at the same time I am not about to give up the technological luxuries of the twenty first century. I guess that I just need to keep searching for what for me would be the promised land. There are parts of Western culture that do leave me cold and that would be the drive to make as much money as possible. I do not want my life to be built around making large amounts of money, which is why I think many people go to college. They want to escape poverty through higher education, which is fine, to a degree. College should also be a place where people are encouraged to step outside of what they know and be willing to learn about and or experience something new and foreign. This doesn't always happen though, because people like to feel safe and secure. America, the land of milk and honey, is all that they need to give them a rich and happy life. Sigh. ... Since I have been spending so much time at home as of late, I've decided that I need to redecorate. I've been at my place for over a year and there are still empty walls. When Jen was over she pointed this out to me and I knew what she meant. It did seem as though I had just moved in and there wasn't that much personality to the place. Now I want that to change. To bring about this change, I went online and found an answer. After some searching, I decided that I am going to give my place an Asian feel except for the bedroom, which already has a very strong French impressionist theme to it. In order to do this I bought five Chinese batiks that I am going to hang in my living room and kitchen. Now the next step is to get some lamps to match, but that may have to wait until later. |