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Fresh, hot wonderful from the blog, Early Bird Special

I’m in one of those moods.  I’ve been home sick for the last two days and melancholy, saturnine, lugubrious, and wistful (mostly wistful) for the last 11,680 days…give or take…and super-all-those-adjectives since Friday.

John and I just finished watching (500) Days of Summer and it made me feel ways about things.  I thought it was an ok, not great, movie, but it was inspirational enough for me to be writing about it now in lieu of the post I had planned on the joys of needle craft and the online beauty and wonderment I have recently beheld.  Stay tuned for that.

So, these feelings I’m having are about my life and the way it’s going.  There was a pivotal scene in the movie where the young man decides he’s (spoiler alert) had enough of his dreary, greeting card writing lifestyle and decides to, once and for all and finally, give his dream of architechting architecture a go.  I know, it’s a pretty played-out plot device, but as I was watching, rolling my eyes, I wondered, what would happen if I stopped rolling my eyes for a minute and actually, really tried to follow my dreams?  What would happen if we all did that?

I don’t mean to say we should all quit our jobs, move to Portland, and start an indie love rock band, but what if we found a way to work really hard at the one thing that made us happy?

Why aren’t we doing that, right now?

What are we all afraid of?

Because that’s what it is.  It’s fear.  Fear of…something…is keeping us from opening up that amazing cupcake shop, or going to art school, or spending every single waking moment of every day listening to all the songs we want to hear with the  people we love most in the world.

I’m also not saying that we’re all Emily Dickinson and Georgia O’Keeffe superstars either; most of us are just Annas and Johns and Jennifers and Chris’s and we’re all waiting around for life’s surprise ending.

We may not change the world or get rich with our one passion, but I’ll bet you a breakfast burrito and everything I own that we each have the power to make at least one other person happier.  And if we can do that, then we have a good shot at making two, five, ten, maybe a hundred people happier, if only for a little while.  If you’re able to find a way to combine doing what you love and improving the way we all spend the time we have left, then you win.

I’ve talked a lot recently about how I’m small-stepping my way to these other dreams; but I’m still afraid.

I hate my job.

There, I said it.  I only say that because it’s not for me.  If I was passionate about engineering, every day would be amazing, fulfilling, and rewarding.  But I’m not and it isn’t.  I think I can find a way to limp through it, but I hate lies and that is not a long-term, lie-free solution.  I’m afraid of losing it and being without money and unloved and wholeheartedly committing to the one or two things I actually feel some passion for.  If I put my everything into doing what I love and failed, what would be the point of going on?  I guess the knowledge that I actually, really tried for once would help me pick myself up and learn how to be marginal at a job I didn’t care for.  Maybe that’s good enough?

I don’t know, but I think we all need to spend this year figuring out how to let go and be amazing.