Clarity of purpose? Or something else?

Check marks on a list give me unreasonable levels of satisfaction. I can't help but think that I read so I can make lists of books that I should read. Every book that I finish gets a check mark. I love how the Audible apps lists books as finished. As a lonely teenager in a windy New Mexico military outpost, I had a list of Nintendo games that I had beaten. I wasn't a fan of sports games because there wasn't really a way to beat them. There was no final boss to defeat. Just beating the computer didn't have that thrill of accomplishment. There is a clarity of purpose in those games. The target is clear. The rules are clear. You just have to figure out how to make it through all the challenges. 

The sense of listlessness that I've been feeling may simply be the lack of clarity of purpose. What I am trying to do? I'm going in a direction towards a vague goal off in the distance, but it's too far to really be very motivating. I've felt this way before. Hell, I wrote about feeling this way last year. This is when I do things like look for another job, decide to apply to another graduate school, or develop some complex and utterly useless personal challenge. All of those tasks have an unambiguous goal and a clear path. You can see your progress and you know when you've succeeded. 

I don't really know what I want to accomplish professionally. I have never thought to give myself goals as a parent or as a husband. I'm not sure a simple goal will cut it these days. It's more about finding what makes me happy. I don't know what that is. Maybe that's what's missing.

Opportunities for meaning

The goal was 10 miles, but he only ran a little over 8 this morning. The waves of frustration and teeth gnashing that were expected never came. A goal was missed, but meeting that goal would have pushed his body too far. There is no point in inflicting injury just to achieve some arbitrary distance on a run. It was hot and humid. He had some water stashed along the route, but it was fairly deep into the run, near the halfway point. The run didn't go as planned, but he was able to get out there and run, push himself a little, and be in a condition where he was there for his family for the rest of the day and is ready to take on another run a few days from now. It didn't meet the plan, but it was a success.

Are there any retail transactions more irksome than buying a car? It takes weeks to shop for the right car, understand the options provided in the different models, and find a dealer who can deliver the right car in an acceptable color. Once that happens, you still have the pleasure of spending a couple of hours at the dealership while all of the various forms are filled out and approved. After all of that, you leave with a new car that loses a huge chunk of it's value the second you leave the lot and a new loan that will take years to pay off. Today it was about being there for her. Sure, he could have been negative and complained and been totally disengaged from the process, but he needed to support her through this challenging process. It wasn't about what he was feeling, it was about what she was experiencing. She needed to have support and reassurance. Being negative would just have added to the stress of an already stressful situation. Positive, reassuring, supportive. That's how things went today. And we're that much closer to finishing the aggravation of buying a new car.

The comments about thinking and reading aren't about thinking and reading. They're about how thinking and reading are a way to hide and disengage from the life that's happening right now. They represent a turning away. It's something that's all about me rather than something that is about us. And it's not that all of my life needs to be about us, but the balance is off. Too much living in my head and not enough living with the family. There is meaning all around us. We don't need to seek it internally or plot a course through life that will deliver us at the portal to profundity and enlightenment. You just need to look around you and engage with what we already possess. It's not about finding or getting more. 

Weighty issues hang in the balance...

Go to the beach or buy a new car. With that whole gay marriage thing resolved by judicial fiat and racial strife being mended by the erasure of critical historical moments (or core memories to put it in Pixar terms), this is the raging topic of the day in my small world. Both positions in this vigorous debate were dealt with earlier this year and felt satisfactorily resolved, but some open rooms in our favorite hotel and random car wonkiness (just a nail in a tire, but next time it could be something really dreadful) have put these two issues at odds in our happy home. Fun now (the beach trip would be this weekend, or This Weeknd to put it in hip-hop terms) or all the pain in the ass aggravation of actually buying a new car now with the longer term satisfaction of having a long simmering issue resolved are the issues under discussion. There is no easy answer. Maybe we can just do both?

Chasing my tail

Just sit here quietly and listen. I named my first Tumblr blog non-random Brownian motion. Oh you clever scientist you. Brownian motion IS random. To call it non-random is to call it something other than Brownian. Watching my focus zipping around from one thing to another feels like a random walk through my aspirations and status seeking goals. Take a look at that Primal Leadership book as a potential way to get that leadership program going? No, that feels too mercenary. Read some of The Recognitions? That's too demanding, besides, I just finished a book earlier tonight. How about Awaken the Giant Within? That's been dragging on forever. I can just focus on reading that and get it wrapped up. But is it worth the time to actually read it? It feels so New Bourgeois. I could write about that, the New Bourgeois, all of these productivity/entrepreneur/self-improvement bloggers who peddle the middle class aspirations of a new generation. That sounds demanding. Play Tetris? Bookworm? Why waste the time. I should do something more constructive and creative. I have all this energy just pent up. Maybe I should just go to bed. Or have another beer.

And that's how most of my uncommitted time gets used up. It just slips away as I spend most of it trying to figure out what I should do next. Should is the right word there. It's not what I WANT to do next. I'm not sure I even know what I would really want to do. It's what I SHOULD do. What would be the action that would garner me the most of what I think I want. Do I want to continue my search for the ideology that will fill my soul with meaning and give me a purpose and direction? My small little life with it's joys and pleasures can't be enough. There must be something more right? I should create something. I feel so trapped in a cage at work, running around and doing other people's bidding, this is my time to do what I need to do to feel fulfilled. Maybe I should figure out just what that would be before I get started on that kind of project. I need to do some research. What book should I read for that? And so the wheel goes around and around until I just give up and go to bed.