Sometimes this boy gets too big for his britches, but I think a lot of people do. I’m the type of person who lives in my head and I’m consciously doing my best to live in the moment more before things get too stuffy up there. I’ve often had big ideas about living all over the world and how the people and places all over this planet seemed much more interesting and hospitable than where I’m from. Probably a naturally immature perspective, however I actually acted on it back in September and packed my shit to move cross country for what would become my dream job.
All due warning would be true about Wisconsin being this cold ass place, which a far different culture than what I was used to. While I consider myself highly adaptable, the pure ambition and idealistic image I had for a job doesn’t levitate on it’s own against the backdrop of a city in the southern part of a pretty white, rural and stereotypically midwestern state.
Whatever… nothing’s permanent. Jobs, location, lots of things… they come and go, right?
Well, what if this wanderlust inside me never goes away? Do you have a wanderlust? Do you have nomadic tendencies? Did your cave men ancestors look at the agriculturist fragments of your tribe like they were fucking nuts for deciding to grow beans and goats?
Yeah, well I think that wanderlust is a big part of me. I fulfilled it to a point. Moving to Wisconsin was and has been one hell of an adventure to satiate the my desire to be shaken and stirred.
However, the part where your family calls and tells you someone’s sick or dying or that someone’s having a baby or that someone’s having a really hard go at it and could use you around to talk to.
When you place a big part of your self worth into being there for the people you care about and making new friends scares and exhausts you, does it make sense to keep moving? I mean, sometimes I sit and look the situations I put myself in and at the type of person I am for face value and I think “well James, I’m completely certain you are either a masochist or brain damaged.”
But what if my character isn’t fatally flawed in the Shakespearean sense? There is an ebb and flow associated with pretty much all aspects of life. Happiness, sadness, death, birth, success and failure…
The tendency for me to push this and other envelopes as far as I know to push them and then continue on until I find great success or get burnt out seems applicable to finding happiness continually through life. I’m not actually unhappy right now either, I just worry too much. I dwell on the past sometimes and how I could have done things differently so that I can learn my mistakes and make them better. Then once I’m content with understanding how I screwed up in the past and learned, I dwell on the future and harass it until it reveals some tangible thing for me to chase around like a cat after a moth.
I find my strength from within and outside of myself and that’s really something that I continually surprise myself with. Even at times when I feel like I’m in an echo chamber where nobody understands me, not even myself, the right thing pops into my mind and it’s like that life line that I need to grab onto once more to pull myself along.
Where do you find your strength and inner will to push on when you constantly find yourself outside of your comfort zone? This is a question to the relocators, the job changers, the people looking to find love again and the people who break rules and take toys apart just to see what they’re really made of.