The discomfort of missing the timeline.

 I spent nearly all of 2017 not working, and I’ve never worked more passionately in all my life. My good friend and brilliant mind, Chris Sheppard often references retirement as the point in one’s life where they finally get to do the “work” that they give a shit about. But I can’t help but ask myself… Who decided this was living, and why the fuck am I going to wait till I’m nearing the end of my life to feel and live this way? 

There is just no way we are on this planet to pound at keyboards under fluorescent lights in the cold (poor insulation in winter + the death AC of  summer, naturally) for 8.5 hours per day, 42.5 hours per week, 2,210 hours per year to get maybe 3 hours of zone out time at home every night and 2 days off a week, and a cramped 2 weeks vacation a year. Hell, make it 4 I don’t care, it’s fucking bullshit no matter how you slice that heaping poop pie. 

There is nearly no amount of money that is now worth it to me to live any other way. I appreciate money and all that it brings I just believe now that there are more ways to get it than I can give my current conscious credit for. 

It’s so easy to limit our thinking in terms of work to what our parents think towards it, or what we learned in the school system. But as a constant rebel to both those authorities most of my life, I questioned the rules then, and I’m doing the same now. 

WHY do I need a house by 25, be married by 28, have kids at 30, and be divorced at 35. What if I travelled at 31, met my long-term partner at 35, have kids (or not) by 38, create a work life that allows communication and idea exchanges to happen remotely so that I can travel around the world with them, or live in a tiny home in the woods, or, or, or. What’s your or? 

You may say, the biological clock, that you want more time to spend with you children and if you have them young than you are granted that. But, the thing is, you aren’t, we aren’t. None of us are. This is the gig we signed up for: we come, we play, we test, and try, but under no circumstances do we get to know with certainty how long we are here for. Not all of us get to live to 100, even the super careful, healthy, calculated, hermit individuals (probably them the least actually). 

My father, who was a beautiful, uncomplicated, happy, life-bursting, compassionate, enigmatic being, dies of Leukemia at the age of 68, I was 28. His father who I never met had passed away when he was 25, his mother 2 years after. My Grandad, passed away by stroke at 91. He was survived by my Granny who 5 years later is celebrating her 92nd birthday this September. 

So sure, life could be long, but it could also be shorter than we think. All to say - what are we waiting for? How could we waste any of it, doing something so unfulfilling? For what, also? For money? For the house, the car, the acceptance of our family and friends? Fuck that.

There are these boxes, you know the ones. They are placed in front of each one of us at many different ages and stages in our lives and tell us that in order to feel a part of, on top of, or somewhere on a spectrum of comparison to tell us where we fit, and when we can check one of those boxes we know we are on the right track. Car (CHECK), HOUSE (No check :(), BF no check :(, kids no check :(… 3 frowns, and well we think that might be it for you. There’s no plan in place for you, there’s no understanding family member, and there are certainly no hope for changing it. You miss these boxes at this time, and well that’s going to set you back for the next round here it comes: sex 2.5 per week, check, kids acting proper looking clean, kids overachieving everyone else, on + on. 

As someone who cannot check those boxes yet, sometimes it is so god damn uncomfortable I want to run as fast as I can in any other direction. I want to run into myself and say mean things, I want to run backwards to people who can just fill the box for me. FILL THE GOD DAMN box something yells at me sometimes. Sometimes it’s the eyes of my mother rolling around in her head as she tells me to just have a baby already. Or it’s my grandmother making a comment that I must have nothing to do with myself of course without and man and a family. Or it’s my own… when you reach this point where you’ve assumed your whole life that by this age it would all just happen, and yet when you got here yo realized this wasn’t what you had been told and pictured, and wanted at all. 

And then that makes you… invisible? Irrelevant? A witch, for certain. 

Here’s how I feel about all these boxes:

I want the RIGHT partner, not the partner I met at a standardized age.  

I want kids to be a product of so much love between that right partner and I, that we are both committed to bringing forth a life in someone that will be bright and beautiful, not a baby born out of a need to fulfill a picture frame or Christmas card. 

I want work to be about more than commutes, managing tasks, and placating to people because they have money or authority, or because I feel like they can do it but I cannot.  

I want life to feel like I can find beauty in it everyday, because otherwise, I just can’t wrap my head around what we’re doing it all for then? 

Those are my new boxes. And you know what, I can’t check any of them yet, but I know now that I don’t need to. There is no rush, there is no demand, there is no timeline, only today, and right now, and if I can live knowing that I am no longer defined by any other boxes than my own than I’ll know them when I’ll see them. 

I’ll know it when I see it. 

Until then, I will write, and hike, and smile, and design, and create, and learn, and go inward, and make connections, and grow, and ask questions, and take chances, and fuck up a hell of a lot, and, and,  and, and one day I’ll check one box and create another, and so one and so forth. 

All to say: there is no end. The achievement isn’t checking the box, it’s in the infinite everything outside of it.