I
am digging into a drawer full of hardware in the
garage, pulling out my drill. And I have to move
this big, heavy circular saw out of the way.
?Does that belong to me?? I ask out loud. ?No
way that belongs to me. Who would ever let me
have a circular saw?? It just seems so adult, so
weighty, and so much more dangerous than the
soft blocks that I would allow myself if I was
on the committee that decided what was
appropriate or not for me to own. Yet,
astonishingly, there it was. When did my life
get so... free? It is like people will just sell
me anything that I have the money to pay for.
What happened to the simple boundaries and clear
goals? And most of all, what happened to three
month summer vacations? Why am I not doing
anything I want me to be doing? There is a
little hyperbole there, but still, that is how
you feel when you are totally slacking off on
one of your major life things. Some things are
okay. I am still getting in a good number of
volunteer hours. I started fencing again last
month, so that is cool ? and it is all as fun as
I remember, too! Everyone should fence. Even
people in traction should have fencing made
available to them. Best moving game ever, and no
mistake. (Best sitting game for partners is
bridge, but I do not get to play often enough.)
But here we are in February, and I am two months
behind schedule on my post-London project, and
at least three more months to go, so at a best
case, I will be five months in the hole due to
excessive slacking and poor time management and
miscellaneous frittering. Nor have I learned
Spanish, nor have I been tracking well on my
financial goals, nor have I learned to play the
piano (which turns out to be surprisingly
expensive to get into! So we chose to give that
one a miss just based on cost). I still have
over thirty books I have bought, waiting in
queue to be read, while The Moral History of the
20th Century remains half-way done, as it has
since the family vacation last year. It is as if
I can feel my brain cells putting up little For
Sale signs and moving to nicer neighborhoods.
And I have no excuses. While I am full of ideas
that I can get excited about, I am just not
doing productive, Scott-enhancing type
activities. I am tempted to blame the contagious
Saltmine malaise for infecting my off-hours, but
the flip side of that should be that my non-work
hours are totally free to do good things with no
spillover of work worries to distract me. Heck,
some days have been so slow that I should have
been making non-work life progress while at
work. And, blah blah blah, I am writing this ?
complaining ? rather than actually sitting down
and doing some useful work. Yeah. I am
practically made of irony. The scariest single
thing in my world that I have always been afraid
of is running out of momentum. I have this
feeling that I was born running at a certain
fast speed, and every time I slow down, it
becomes harder and harder rev back up and thus
it is almost impossible to go faster again. Like
my RPMs, once sacrificed, never come back. This
worry starts early for me, too. I remember in my
first year of Junior High, I whipped through my
assignments with alacrity. I would come home
from school and sit myself right down ?
voluntarily! ? and do my homework. A couple of
hours later, I would be done, we would have our
family dinner, and the night was free. Then next
year, I just did not have the energy to do
homework right after school, and I would put it
off. And so the months and years progressed and
I moved slower and slower, until finally in my
senior year I was falling behind and would do a
week?s worth of assignments on a continuous
sheet from a roll of butcher paper just to find
a gimmick to get me to do some work. And on and
on. I used to be very excited about my nascent
career in IT, I used to chase promotions and
raises, but now I am just marking time for a
couple more years while working to pay off the
house and not need the larger IT paychecks
anymore. I have become one of those complacent
tech workers I used to pity, who seemed happy
just doing their job with no real plans to
advance themselves in the organization. I worry.
When I slow to a stop, how am I ever going to
get moving again? I will end up on the floor at
Office Depot, directing grandparents to the
current version of PrintShop so they can make
family Christmas cards. I tell myself (and have
done so for the last several years) that I need
to find my next passion, so I will have
something I am excited about pursuing and which
will naturally rev me back up for the next phase
of my life. Alas, I have absolutely no idea what
that next passion is. No idea at all. Many
interests, but none of them presents itself as
capital-P Passion. Maybe I am just frightened of
leaving the safety of the little nest I have
built here. Anything else I do is likely to mean
a lot less material comforts than I am able to
enjoy now. I want to be really certain of the
Next Big Thing before I commit to it, because
otherwise, I will have given up a lot for no
real purpose. Maybe that thought makes me too
cautious. I dunno. And meanwhile, I just keep
drifting and slowing. And even the things that I
do set for myself to do come to naught.
Frustrating.