Wednesday, June 16, 2010

If you don't know what you want

you don't know what you have. For the first time in about a decade and a half, I find myself thinking I should be even more grateful and appreciative than I usually am. This new found sense of "I should realize how truly lucky I am" is both annoying and amusing to me because I feel stuck.

I know myself so well and have no reason to complain that I don't "want" for many things. Sure, it would be nice to win the lottery so I can just volunteer forever, but barring that, I'm great. Yet, because I don't know what I want because I seemingly have everything, I also can't see what I have and what else I need. I'm lost on where I should be headed or what I should be working on or toward. I'm left with the feeling of "now what?"

A part of me wants to wallow is this being stuck phase to not fear it, embrace it, and work through it. The other part of me wants to be Type A about it and apply everything I read in Gretchen Rubin's book, The Happiness Project. The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle, but it's striking to me that I don't know how I want to feel about it or how to "solve" it. It's like I recognize that I don't know that I don't know, even though I know. LOL :)

At the very least in all of this, I'm sleeping well, eating well, exercising, socializing, going about my day per usual. This source of mild annoyance and amusement mostly only permeates my thinking when I first wake up and before I go to bed. The rest of my day is too busy or too fun, yet in quiet moments of solitude when I normally think about how else I want to live my life with purpose and intention, this current struggle arises.

I would truly love to be Elizabeth Gilbert and go away like in Eat, Pray, Love. She took what almost looked like a vacation from life itself, not just work. She reveled in being her and discovering herself and the world. She had no obligations whatsoever and that freed her to truly listen to herself without any distractions.