Post Thanksgiving Ponderings

 Thanksgiving was remarkably low key this year.  It is, as one commenter has pointed out, a sort of short term enforced holiday: it is relatively unique to the US, it lasts for a day (or two), and given the nature of the holiday, there are often a limited number of things one can do (and watching Sportsball for me is not one of those things). 

We had a pretty quiet family time, dinner of salmon/orzo with vegetables/sweet potato, with one's choice of pumpkin or pecan pie for dessert.  As per tradition, we watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.  Other than that I read and napped a bit.

Friday was largely a repeat of Thursday:  read more, planted what garden I was going to plant for the year (mostly leafy greens at the end of the garden that gets sun; the garlic went in last month) and pulled up a small bucket of sweet potatoes. From there, the week eased back into its normal form:  Iaijutsu class and Produce (A)Isle on Saturday, church and rabbit shelter on Sunday.  

Like that, we lurch into the holiday season and the end of the year.

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One of the things that occurred to me is that I might actually be reaching a delayed mid-life crisis.

My life feels as if it h as a lot of "going through the motions" about it at the present time.  I get up, I do some things, I do to work and do somethings, I come home and do some things or go to another job and do some things.  There is a lot of doing, but it just feels like it often doing just because that is what I have always done.

It is perhaps fair to allow myself the luxury that this has been a year of a lot of changes and that in some ways, my "purpose" up to this point is fulfilled:  Na Clann are now effectively safely launched off into their own lives, TB the Elder is gone and my mother, for all of our monthly visits and my sister checking in on her, is beyond any power I have to help.  And I find myself in that position of being too "young" to retire but too "old" to be truly interested in rebuilding a career in my current field, having lurched back into it after a 3 year absence.

Outside of the rabbit shelter and the pets, there is no where I feel "needed".  Just a lot of places where I am "useful".

When that thought hit me, it made me think.  A great deal.  Because whether by accident or design, I have believed myself to be needed.  But almost every one of the areas of my life, I could effectively disappear and there perhaps would be a small notice somewhere that I was gone, but not much (I excluded here my family and the rabbit shelter and Iaijutsu, where I continue to play some kind of necessary role).

This is, I suspect, where lots of people go astray:  have found their purpose or meaning gone or their deep emotional connections gone, they try to find any number of things to fill that void.

The "filling the void" thing is not necessarily an issue; the fact that more and more I feel like like I am simply floating through life without any purpose or direction.

One can hope this is a temporary state of affairs; after all, any of the previous "purposes" were predated by the fact they at one time did not exist, so at some point it is fair to assume that something new will appear.  But I have to admit that this sense of treading water is far more disorienting (and frankly, depressing) than I had anticipated.