I spent a week just feeling that: life is going to be short. Part of it was certainly my birthday: hitting thirty is a rude reminder of aging, and definitely started the thoughts rolling.
My life is 1/3 over, and that’s the best case! I eat healthy food, stay active, andand have long-lived relatives, but I also ride motorcycles, travel a lot, rock climb, cliff jump — honestly, there have been a couple of things that should have killed me already. And that got me thinking: “Am I living the life I want?”
And the answer was no. Not a resounding no, not a cry of desperation, but just a quiet whisper of, “There’s more”.
My favorite quote is by Rilke, begging his friend to “have patience” and “learn to love the questions themselves” to eventually “live your way into the answer”. Eric Erikson’s stage development theory suggests a similar sort of life experimentation, postulating that full psychological development, where a person is securely living in the life she has chosen for himself, can only be achieved after a period of purposeful, committed life experiments.
When he is in this stage, she isn’t bouncing randomly from lifestyle to lifestyle, but committing to a life, working through it, learning from it, then growing and changing what doesn’t fit. I’m there.
My life has been good, and so much better than life as a teacher, but some of my schedule hasn’t fit well. I’d been really stressed about work, barely landing new jobs; I was burning out. I needed some change.
And it really was the worst time for the motorcycle trip my two good friends were suggesting. I needed to make money, not spend it! Could I afford to take off work? What about the money I needed to save for my trip to the US? How could I do it?
By jumping in. I worked some on the trip, but more importantly I was living a dream and spending time with two driven entrepreneurs. We discussed business strategy, challenged each other — and had an absolutely amazing two weeks on motorcycles. And now I’ve already earned more in the first 9 days of June than either April or May. Life’s good.
wanderlustadventurer 