Everything’s got to end sometime. Otherwise nothing would ever get started.
The Doctor
Everybody has a thousand things going on at once. You can keep track of one, maybe two, at a time. But the rest of your life is happening, like it or not. At any given time some things will be good, some bad, and some pushing your life in a random direction. Usually the chaos actually keeps us grounded. When nine-hundred ninety-nine things pull in different directions they end up mostly canceling each other out. Then there’s the times they all coincide. The astrologist will call it the stars aligning. The devout will call it divine intervention. The statistician calls it inevitable over long enough time periods.
You can fight it, but I’ve yet to meet anybody who can fight against everything in his life pushing him in a direction and succeeding. Then again, anybody who can probably ascends to a higher plane of being and isn’t interested in what must then be mundane things like death of loved ones or happy life milestones. Best most of us can do is pick a distant point downstream of fate and hope to shift our destiny by a few degrees. And that’s where I am now. Again. But this time with the preceding wisdom.
Don’t think that’s bad.
If anything, there’s a comfort that can be found in between the existential horror of seeing the path of your life open like a paper map in front of you. You might as well look forward and bid adieu to the nine-hundred ninety-nine other directions you could have been pulled in. Maybe one or two are worth thinking about, but you can know you’ll never have to worry about most of them. Life has given you a road sign and you’re standing where the pavement ends.
“That’s a story I might share some time,” is something I’ll probably be saying a lot going forward. Like about how my job went from great to horrible to actually kind of good again. Or how I managed to really get on top of my finances. Maybe about how getting a real, genuine, old school Dungeons and Dragons game going was on my bucket list. And a whole bunch of other things that I won’t even allude to yet. So if you want those stories, feel free to ask. Or wait until the whim to put them here hits me.
For now though, I certainly feel like one chapter of my life is ending. All the big things in life people worry about, mostly, have changed for me in 2021. But I’m thinking about starting new things. Or maybe it’s better to say I’m thinking about doing the old things I have wanted to do, but doing them right. It can be a little hard to tell the difference because in some ways I feel free and confident. In others I feel depressed and hopeless.
Just as an example, I’m finally in a position I can just travel about as I wish… with virtually nowhere to go because of lockdowns. I finally feel the confidence to be a social person… with nobody around to be social with due to lockdowns. Story of my life in so many ways. Set a goal, work hard to get there and when I’m finally there, turns out I’m a day late and a buck short. Great that I can meet my goals, depressing that I’m always close enough to think that next time it’ll work out.
So maybe it’s the same as it ever was. 2022 is me thinking, this time, it’ll be better. If the path to success were easy and straightforward you wouldn’t have to think about it. Since I’m throwing around idioms like they’re hot potatoes, often the journey is more important than the destination. And this journey has really sucked since it feels like it’s all been alone. That’s a story I might share some time.
But it’s also not done yet. The world is changing mightily fast. And I’m ready for it. So I’m picking a point so far away I can’t describe it to you, but I know it’s there and that’s the degree of destiny I’ll angle towards.