Friday Thinking

Quietly reflective inside this morning.

Am I following the right plan? For that matter, am I following any plan at all?

I am dogged by this sense that I have made a series of less than excellent decisions that have brought me to the point of my life that they are now. Not all of them were bad of course, but on the whole there seems to be no sense of unified direction or a whole to them.

The result? I am where I am now, with no real sense of where to go next or even where I am going.

Part of me says this is simply the nature of life, that life is a series of incidents we certainly cannot forsee and we react to. And on some level I continue to believe that - we exist in the midst of a universe of cause and effect, and we often do not cause the effects we have to deal with.

At the same time, I see those that achieve their goals around me all the time, those who have chosen their direction in life and have clung to it through thick and thin until they have achieved what they set out to do. Surely they have had such random effects occur in their lives as well, yet somehow they managed to move through those to achieve their goals or objectives.

Do I have goals and objectives? Sure. Does it look like they have the least chance of being met now given the current state of where I am? Not at all.

And that's where the confusion comes in. I guess I could meet them - if I abandoned everything I had and every responsibility in my life and pursued "me" only. Unfortunately the toll, in lives affected and financial chaos, would make any such "victory" a hollow and pointless one.

On the other hand, it often seems like if I hold up my commitments and my responsibilities, my life will simply continue to be what it has become. There is a sense, at least in myself, that I am so much less in so many ways that I used to be. Things I wanted to do or enjoyed are constantly getting swept off the map to meet commitments and responsibilities, until my life feels like it has become one long commute between two places. My fear is that I will wake up and find that at some point I cannot go back, that I am cast in place precisely where I am and that there is only the long slow road to oblivion.

And every time I plan, I lay something out on paper or in my mind, I am overwhelmed by events of the here and now, things that need to be dealt with - and that piece of paper gets filed somewhere, becoming part of an ever-growing fossil record of good intentions and dreams of the life that I didn't have.

The question is, what do I do about it? And what do I do about it that is meaningful?