Amateur Cartography

But I am not an explorer.  I haven't a single explorer on my planet.  It is not the geographer who goes out to count the towns, the rivers, the mountains, the seas, the oceans, and the deserts.

–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

This won’t come as a surprise if you've been paying attention, but I haven’t been feeling very positive about life lately.  I checked with a friend and the notion was seconded.  There has apparently been an observable decline in my optimism and cheerfulness in the past several months.  I could get into how it happened and what’s to blame for all of it, and I’d probably come up with some good answers, but knowing those things isn’t particularly helpful in this situation.  The questions I should really be asking are ‘what have I been doing that I need to stop doing?’ and ‘what things can I do that I haven’t been doing enough of?’

I’ve been going over and over this in my head for weeks, and I think there are probably a fair number of minor adjustments that could be made, but it hit me a few minutes ago that the major thing I’ve been doing in the last few months that I wasn’t doing before is that I’ve been thinking too far ahead, worrying about problems that haven’t arisen yet, and that may never arise.  Yes, it’s good to plan for the future, but when I had a wake-up call about how short life can be and I quit being a lawyer and decided to make some major changes, I also resolved not to do that anymore.  Not to get my head so tangled up in every possible thing that could go wrong years down the line that I never made any real decisions.  Not to put off my happiness until conditions were “favorable,” i.e., my life was exactly the way I’d envisioned it.  And I did quite well for a while.  But for one reason and another, I’ve somehow wandered back to the point where I am today, too concerned about where I’m going, not nearly concerned enough about where I am. 

It stops now.  I’m going back to being more in the present.  It’s true that I’ve realized this year that I may have gone too far with my “no tomorrow” theory, and that I can’t just drift along forever hoping I’ll stumble into a satisfying life.  This means that, yes, I still have some very real concerns about my present and about my future, and I need to sort those out.  But I’m going to come at them one at a time, as they relate to the life I’m living now, and not try to guess at every conceivable consequence of each action and try to figure out how to deal with those, too.  The best choices I’ve ever made have been the result of other actions I took.  They have not come from a process of bullying my brain into deciding something.  And the happiest times of my life have been those when I had goals I was aiming for, but not overly-specific road maps that I felt pressured to follow.  Because there are always surprises, always unforeseen obstacles or delays.  And the more I had my heart set on every detail going a certain way, the worse it felt when the world had other ideas for me.  So I’m going to have to let go of a few things that I’ve been trying too hard to control.  If I need to grip it so tightly, maybe it's not something I'm meant to have.  And who knows?  Perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised by what keeps floating around me once I've let go.  As my friend Elaine’s pappy says, “What’s for you won’t go past you!”*

Also, I’m going back to the list.  Look forward to a series of entries detailing how I’ve attempted (and succeeded at) crossing items off the epic list of things I want to do before I die.  Please hold me accountable.  If these entries don’t start appearing soon, do me a favor and ask me about the items.  And if I ask you for help with checking one off, do both of us a favor, and say yes.  I bet you won’t regret it.

*Thanks again for that gem, Elaine.