New Year's Review

Prior to Buddy's birth, I was always wondering, to borrow the title of Po Bronson's book, "What Should I Do With My Life?" (I even posted study questions from that book earlier this year.)

It’s a question that just doesn’t seem that important to me right now. The urgency around it has left. And I am so grateful. I have spent more than enough time in my life agonizing over it.

I’d heard it said that having a child focuses you, puts things into perspective. Leaving aside the whole mess of how one's life and priorities change with having a child in the first place, it also becomes a lot easier to answer the question “What is most important to me?” when my resources outside of child-rearing become more limited, and I have to scrounge for every available bit of time/space/money/energy. "What is most important to me" is whatever I feel I have to do to feel most wholly myself (and thereby also most available to my chosen commitments of child, mate, and work).

Who knows why this seemed so impossible for me to figure out in the past? I could speculate for pages but would only end up boring myself and any others foolish enough to stick along.

In any case, this year I was granted a respite from the grinding questions of WHY is this important HOW is this meaningful WHAT will this mean for my life, and could, in little morsels of space for myself, just do, and be, as I most wanted.

(I think also my sheer animal pleasure in Buddy helped open that space for me. I am happiest in a kinesthetic rather than analytic mode anyway, but it’s very easy to let monkey mind take over in everyday life. Having Buddy around moves me more easily into my body.)

And at the end of the year, what turned out to be most important to me outside of Buddy? Spending time with The Dude. Spending some time every day in purposeful movement. Connecting and reconnecting with friends. Making things with my hands again. Being of help at work.

I realize that the two questions I bring up, “What should I do with my life?” and “What is most important to me?”, are not the same. There is an urgency, a pressure, to the first one, that to me relates to other questions about vocation, about having a sense of calling or mission, about ambition and feelings of self-worth… I think what I am grateful for at the end of 2009 is that this question is no longer, or not currently at least, the one I feel I need to answer.

Happy New Year Everyone!