It wasn’t so long ago that I made an attempt to articulate how I wanted to live my life. With flexibility and mobility. I want to travel, but keep Salem as a home base. To work with books, with innovation and freedom.
Today, I realize this life of which I dreamed is the one I live. It’s true I don’t have the traditional markers of safety or security that impress more traditional types, but I have joy and adventure and community worth more than most severance packages.
In thinking about “next things” it is not a redemptive deus ex machina I require – the single phone call that introduces the circumstances within which I am able to live my best life – but an ongoing evolution, supported by the roots I’ve cultivated in Salem and nourished by the adventure and innovative labor I seek around the world.
There were times this week when I’ve thought — or others have hinted — that a course change is required. As I approach thirty, I should start setting my sights on safety and security rather flexibility and mobility. Perhaps there’s some truth in that, and I am, of course, not yet thirty.
But what I know today is definitively true is that I don’t need to go looking this way and that for the next thing. It’s already here; I’m already doing it, except when I’m trying to figure out what it should be.
I’m not sure how this story of my life untangles itself or even if it has reached a climax of any significance. Those observations come with distance. I think I have decided, though, that this trajectory is pretty satisfying and I’m looking forward to not necessarily the next different thing, but the next inevitable thing.
Goat anyone? 