make yourself.

Not the Incubus song. Although that brings back a lot of memories...Lately (let's be honest, always) I've been thinking a lot about the all-important question: What am I going to do with my life? This is really not one question at all, but a series of questions...Where will I work next? Where will I go to grad school? Will I go to grad school? Who will I marry? Will I get married? And as potentially depressing as never finding answers to these magnitudinous questions may seem, spending precious time dwelling on these questions ranks in at slightly less fulfilling than spending a night in, alone, with a pet cat and Magic 8 Ball.

What has always struck me as puzzling about this all-consuming question is that it infers that at some point I will reach an arbitrary place at which I will start doing this thing that I have not until that point actually been doing: living my life. Kind of like when I was in college and no one ever asked me about how school was going until after they had received a disappointing answer to the real question, "So are you dating someone?"

I suppose there are some people who are lucky and know what they want to do at the forefront. Up until now, I thought I needed to spend time figuring it out and that the only way I could do that is to find myself. How can I know what I want to do if I don't know who I am? Which begs the question, how can I know who I am if I don't do something?

I found this the other day. The concept isn't new, even to me, and maybe it's just the punchy type font, but this really resonated with me in the profoundest of ways. Enough to write it down, and definitely enough to share.

*Not unknown at all...George Bernard Shaw

Life is happening every second, and every second we have a new opportunity to choose how we spend our time, and who we spend it with. Whether or not we do it consciously, we are in fact deciding what to do with our lives every single second. The more time we spend worrying about how the sum total of our decisions is going to pan out in the scheme of things, and worse, how it will be perceived by others, the more we risk missing millions of chances to live the kind of life everyone else is trying to find.

And if you still find yourself struggling to re-frame your frame of mind, just look back and look at all of the things you've done. Chances are, they're amazing. Give yourself a hug, and move forward. Life is good and the future is bright.