Pausing for a Breath

The concept of rushing overtook me at work yesterday.

It does not  help that I have been feeling a little bit out of things - a sinus infection that is hanging on longer than it should.  That tends to make me not quite move at full speed.

But a thought has been nagging at me, a thought that has come to fruition  both in terms of doing too much and rushing through what I do, one of those types that are life changing if you will simply allow yourself to sit and think about them.

What am I doing? And why am I doing it?

I have commented before that I always seem to be in a rush, going from here to there doing this activity and that, driven by the sense that I have a great deal to do and only a limited time to do in.  So fair question:  where did  that concept come from?

If I am honest, it is an old one, driven both the fact that I feel like I have certain gifts and talents that I am not using to my fullest (and should be, I am accountable for them) and the fact that I although I have to do something now that I do not particularly care for I also have the activities that I want to do and that if I do not do these, I will simply lose my soul and become one of "them", an automaton that simply goes through life working with little expectations of anything else.

Fair enough.  Question One;  where does this sense of having to use your abilities - of, if we could put a phrase in my mouth, "being destined", come from?

I am not sure.  It is not something that anyone else put there for me, some sense of "you are great and gifted and should be doing great things".  That is just an assumption on my part, an assumption that the things I was given were not to be wasted.  I have tried, in the past, to exercise said gifts but they have never led to anything like that:  three times trying to register for the pastorate went nowhere as did an attempt to become a teacher/elder; teaching at a college level was fun but financial unsustainable; writing has made me no money (although I impact people's lives, to be fair); and my one "big risk", the Firm, the thing that was going to break me into the ranks of the wealthy and allow me to do real good and what I wanted, ended up an abysmal failure (for myself, at least).  In other words, trying to live out this believed "calling" of greatness has not been, on the whole, successful.  But maybe it was never meant to be.

Question Two:  If you do not do these activities you speak of and only focus on a few things, you will lose your soul.

This one is hard for me to combat. If I do not do something, I feel myself becoming an automaton with a fixed and tepid life: get up, consume my day in work, drive home, do a couple things, and then go to sleep.  Forever.  The work is beige, my life is beige, a sort of pale color that is bland and does nothing.

But (as Jambaloney pointed out) does setting many things out to do only to have most of them not done make your life better or worse (my words, not his)?  Or do you simply create more stress by setting up these goals which you will simply never attain.

In a way, it made me very sad when I considered all of this last night, quietly sad.  In a sense it felt like surrendering to the inevitability of the fact that life, in all of its tedious dreariness, would win and I would lose.  That I truly was on the verge of becoming the cog in the machine.

But are you happy with things as they are?  This was the response that I had to myself.  Always rushing, always trying to do things  yet never really doing any of them because you are too exhausted or too mentally stretched to do any of them and never really enjoying the things that you are doing because you always have to move on to the next thing?

There is no margin in my life, no ability to move from a task to another task slowly or even to stop and dwell on a particular thing.  It is always rushing here and there, doing this and doing that because I should be doing more because I am responsible to be doing more.

But am I?