The Rolling Stones are clearly role models for my generation. Good grief, that was some kick-ass half-time show. Kinda makes me want to vow to go kicking and screaming into old age. Gnarly and energetic, and clearly loving what they do - much better than those golden seniors you see in the AARP ads, if you ask me. That's the way I wanna do it.
So I think I finally figured out what to do with myself this year.
This started out as a personal exercise related to my tai chi class - give yourself a goal for the year and follow through on attaining it. I talked with Stephe about it a little, and explained that I'm feeling mighty splintered these days. I have several areas of deep personal interest that I wish to pursue - some of which I have been very involved in, and others which I have been neglecting. Part of my problem is that I feel divided against myself - there are several versions of 'me' out there - which one do I allocate my free time to today? The end result of that kind of thinking, of course, is that nothing much gets done and my entire life feels like a collection of unfinished or (worse) unstarted projects.
So, when I stated the problem as such to Stephe, he offered the following:
You might consider where they intersect So that one goal is shared by more than one pursuit
And of course, it immediately became clear to me that the goal to some sort of fulfillment is not to divide my time, but to reintegrate my interests with my self and try to connect the dots between all of the versions of 'me'. For example, the 'me' who wishes to write for Blogcritics is currently working on a review of a tai chi book that the student 'me' wished to read and understand. Perhaps the photographer 'me' will take a picture to illustrate the review. The general idea is to see where my interests intersect each other, and work with each other, rather than swimming against the tide by trying to create multiple identities for myself which don't really add up to a whole person in the end.
I'm not sure why it took me so long to come to the realization that compartmentalization isn't healthy, at least not in this way. I've never really run any other part of my life that way, so I'm not quite sure why I felt my 'outside interests' needed to be pursued this way. When I think back to times when the world made sense with a kind of crystal clarity that one doesn't often achieve, they were always those times in which everything in my world seemed connected in some deeply fundamental way. The connections between things are what reinforce the notion that the world really is a web, and plucking a string over here sets off a barely-felt vibration way over there...
