Sunday, September 30, 2007

Every Life Has to Have a Theme

My new motto...
Breathe Easy.
Laugh Hard.

Perfect Thursday

My perfect Thursday would begin with a gentle whisper, a soft caress of my cheek, and the brush of my husband’s lips across my forehead. The heady scent of our favorite coffee brewing carries up the bedroom stairs and lingers over my gradually waking senses. Stretching long and lithely, I would prop my head up on two downy pillows and reach over to discover my alarm clock had never been set for the a.m. hours.
Sleepily brushing the last remnants of dreams from my eyes I would turn to my husband for a good morning kiss only to find him crawling back into bed. He’s called in sick. Curling up in his arms, I happily grasp the reality that for today, if only for today, we have no agenda, no task list, no calendar to fill or meetings to attend. For today, our only obligations are to sleep, laugh, and love.

A Crisis of Heart

For the past week, I've struggled to maintain something resembling sanity. At a moment when I least expected it, Life grabbed my shoulders and threw me to the ground in a block that would make even Brian Urlacher wince. My stomach rejected food. My eyes ran from sleep. And my mind... Ah, that tricky little thing. My mind won countless virtual gold medals for each of the myriad mental gymnastics meets I held for a week straight.
Why did I put myself through such anguish, such torture? A crisis of heart. For what seems like the 9th or perhaps 10th time in my relatively brief life, I couldn't understand where I am going. I'm one of those few unfortunate souls who, try as I might, cannot subscribe to a lifelong career without - brace yourself for that ugly, demoralizing, shouldbeafourletterwordifitweren'tforthethreeextraletters word - passion. Financial successes, respect, even sporadic happiness has only temporarily distracted me from what I would otherwise love to forget. I need meaning. I need to feel that what I do is unique to me. Is my own. I need to know I can write sentences with only one word and if that's what I feel, then that's truth. I need to be able to answer the canned high school reunion career question with a passion and pride that I what I do is not just a job but a vocation. There's only one small problem with all of this...

...I don't know what I want to do.