Back to the Beginning

My last post was written during a very frustrated moment, and while some of what I said may be true, I don’t truly believe it all.  I’m actually very much a romantic and an idealist. I tend to be easy going and carefree. I wish for peace, love and happiness for everyone. I pray that someday the world will be a fair and just place. The problem is that the contradiction between the things that I believe in and the things that are, really gets me down sometimes.  Let it be known; however, there are things in life that I care about –a lot. I believe true love is out there and that happiness can be conceived- not to say that it doesn’t take some work to find or accomplish these things, and not that there won’t be some price to pay for having them, but if true love and happiness is the reward, then whatever the price, it really is worth paying.

Now, before I move on, let me catch you up on how I got from “Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life” to “The search for life in my life is a pointless quest...” It’s kind-of a long story, so I’ll do my best to make it brief without leaving out any pertinent details.  It was, however, over a year and a half time span, so it may take a few posts...

On October 17, 2010 I was still in the throes of love and a relationship that after much time had finally been taken to the next level. I was writing poetry and reading books and enjoying having previous mundane responsibilities lifted from me. It was a working mother’s dream...I felt like I was at a point in my life where I could start over and figure out exactly what I was meant to do and take the time to make the life that I wanted. The problem was, I didn’t know what that was, and so I began the search that inspired the beginning of this blog. I thought it would be nice to record and share my journey, but my journey soon became chaotic, stressful, depressing and confusing and my urge to share completely diminished.

In the beginning of November of that year I fell in a grocery store with glass bottles in my hands and was cut up pretty badly. My right hand was lacerated in several places, and the nerves in my thumb severed.  I had surgery to repair the damage, but was in a lot of pain and discomfort for about 5 months.

After my hand was mostly healed and I was feeling a little more like myself again, I got into a network marketing business(that I’ll discuss in more detail later), which I actually enjoyed very much, even though networking is not my strongest suit. I was learning new things and meeting some wonderful people, and it got me out of the house. I also attempted to pursue my writing of poetry.  I entered some contests and spent a lot of time on writing websites trying to get rid of my rustiness. I also tried to get back into graphic design, studying textbooks and online how-to’s and working on self-invented projects that had little or no purpose.  

None of these things were able to hold my interest; however, because my relationship was crumbling around me. My scholarly, entrepreneurial boyfriend was more interested in reading and entrepreneur-ing than he was in me. Being the romantic girl that I am, and having only worked at a traditional job in the past, it was very difficult to stay focused and self-motivated.  All I wanted to do was work out our differences and make everything bright and shiny again.  This became a huge conflict and I became more and more depressed and the search for life in my life began to feel very futile...

Months into the search

Its been a year and a half since my last post, and I'm no closer to finding life than I was in 2010. I've loved and loved harder and lost and regained. I've been hurt, slammed, turned upside down. Tuned out, tuned in, and turned inside out. I've traveled here and there and stumbled across some fears. I've written some poems that came from raw emotion and I've read and studied and searched. I'm tired and I'm numb, and this is the only conclusion I've come to about life... I don't think there's anything in this world that I really want or truly care about anymore. Not music. Not money. Not knowledge. Not accomplishment. Not beauty. Not passion. Not even love. It's all pointless. It's all a big lie. None of it matters. It's not worth anything. In order to accomplish something, you don't get to enjoy anything. To love someone, you leave yourself completely vulnerable. Money allows you possessions that fulfill nothing except acting as fuel to desire more possesions. Music is just sounds to fill your head with desires that will never be conceived.   Beauty is a mirage that diminishes self. Passion is a flame which tortures your soul.  Knowledge does nothing except to make you realize how futile it all is.    What is the end result of it all? Death. We live our lives to be in love or to be successful or to accomplish a dream. But what then? We fall in love and live each day just to be together with that special someone,  but after some time, does that togetherness not become mundane?  Maybe we spend our lives working to become a success, but what is success? A nice car? A big home? At what cost? At the cost of being held hostage by the things that you worked so hard to acquire?  Maybe happiness is to accomplish something...something small, something big...but after you accomplish it then what? The next thing? Something bigger and bigger and bigger....until...you die...and what then, is the value of accomplishment?  There's always a price to pay. True happiness cannot be conceived. It does not exist...as perfection does not exist. We are perpetually striving to acquire or accomplish things which do not exist.  Perhaps tomorrow or next year I will feel differently, but this is what I have found thus far. The search for life in in my life is a pointless quest-one that will uncover no true fulfillment, just busy work that allows me to forget all this until my time comes.

Pondering the Search

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life! Isn't that how the saying goes? Well, for me that's how it goes, because yesterday I realized that I have no passion in my life. Today I'm taking it easy and pondering that, and tomorrow the search begins.

I'm a 38 year old woman living in Las Vegas. I've been working as a waitress for over 20 years and have recently become unemployed. I live with my wonderful boyfriend, who is an entrepreneur and an avid scholar so therefore, is generally very busy. This is good and bad for me. Financially it makes life fairly easy- my personal bills are a minimum and everything else is taken care of, but with no job and nothing that I am passionate about doing, as he is, I find myself with way too much time on my hands- and you know what they say about idle hands! Since I have come to hate the profession at which I have toiled away for so long and don't really have the skills or experience to do much else in this horrible economy, I have decided to go on a concentrated search for whatever that hidden passion of mine might be.

There are and have been many things that I'm interested in or enjoy doing, but over the years most of those things have lost their "pizazz" for me. Maybe because I stopped doing them along the way, or maybe because I just don't enjoy them as much anymore. I intend to re-explore many of those things and newly explore many others.

Let's see...here are the things I can remember enjoying over the last 3 decades... horses-riding, training and showing. I no longer have any horses though, so that may have to wait.  Writing-I still do this from time to time and would like to do more of it-hence, this blog.  Reading-nice to pass time, but not a passion. Music-there's one. I used to play the clarinet, and I was a radio DJ for a few years in college (one of the many colleges where I never finished a degree). I've enjoyed acting, physical fitness, playing tennis, drawing, painting, computer design (another unfinished degree), cooking, baking, entertaining, nutrition/natural health care, snowboarding, roller-blading, swimming, dancing, scrap-booking (shhh...don't tell anyone), cake decorating, sewing, fashion, modeling, classic cars, camping, fishing, 4-wheeling...I can't seem to think of any others right now, so I guess those are the important ones.

I have probably had an interest in almost every single thing under the sun (that I've heard of) at one point or another. Most of those were fleeting interests, but perhaps worth looking into. I won't list them all, but want to jot down a few ideas of things that I've been interested in lately or that have stuck in my head over the years...
Photography, pinhole photography, singing(scares the crap out of me for some reason, but is also a draw), fashion design, hang-gliding...hmm, that was a short list, but I guess it gives me a few things to think about.

So, there it is, the beginning of my blog, which in the following entries will document the search for life and passion in my own life (and hopefully make me a better writer)!