an open space

"Some people look for a beautiful place. Others make a place beautiful." {-Hazrat Inayat Khan}

I realize the older I get, the more I don't know who I am at all.

A designer/illustrator named Karl sits at the desk across from me at work, and when our workspace becomes oddly silent he'll use the whoopie cushion app from his iphone in his pants pocket to mysteriously eject loud farting sounds into the room, and after erupts into laughter. Karl is in his 50s, and I came home from work one day to tell my boyfriend, Tyson, that I appreciate how Karl isn't much more than a overgrown kid, with a balding head and a perverted sense of humor. And we asked ourselves if we'll reach some age where we'll just grow up, thinking of our polite and conservative parents, relatives, professors, etc. "Did my parents ever laugh at a penis joke?" Tyson asked aloud, and we both wondered if one day we'd just roll out of bed, all grown-up and and as serious as trolls, scoffing at pranks and jokes about feces.

But nevermind the non-sequitur comparison of seriousness equalling adulthood, or adulthood equalling knowing who you are. I feel I'm a fairly stable person most of the time. I show up to work on time, I pay my bills on date, I maintain stable friendships without too much drama. But my feelings about life and the future are about as volatile as Walla Walla weather.

And the way my scattered brain all connects these things (quote and work story) is that I have long been on the fence about the idea that contentment equals maturity - knowing your role, knowing which dreams are fluff or worth pursuing. And every other day, I want to live so many different ways, not sure which route is realistic, or more importantly, which route would make me happy: in expensive sadness (yeah, The Kills! if you got that reference, I'm in love with you), married to my work and ambition, all around the fucking globe never stopping to have a home, or simply, with no more money than i'd really need, with a few bicycles hanging in the garage, with meals cooked from farmer's market produce on the table every night at 6 pm, with a husband and mischievous children, with friends who like to play scrabble on a Saturday night. Small instances like flipping through a travel magazine, a phone call that didn't seem to go quite right, or an off-handed and hurtful comment from my father about how my life has taken a rather unfortunate/different path from the plans he made for me in his head, making me violently sway one way or the other.

But I need to breathe, embrace my surroundings, realize that while I may feel occasionally suffocated by overbearing phone calls, condescending remarks, or the redundant 8-5, I live on my own, in my own house. I buy, eat, wear, and travel where I want, and when I take things one day at a time, content without answers, making small choices and smiling at little things, I feel pretty okay, maybe even happy.

[sigh]

I'll end with a quote by Rainer Maria Rilke, because I can never say as eloquently, the things inside my very own heart as someone else can or has.

"I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."