In the past five years, I've found my life full of challenges without easy answers, things that require persistence and determination without any guarantee of resolution - the back pain doctors couldn't figure out, the intestinal issues my son had that left doctors with little more than the phrase "hopefully he'll grow out of it", the stream of financial setbacks, including a shocking explosion at my husband's place of business - that left me asking, "Why is this kind of thing happening over and over in my life? How come everything I'm trying to fix seems to have no answer, no matter how hard I try to find it?" I felt like I was bleeding to death from tiny nicks. The more I tried to apply everything I'd learned from my family and community about how to live and handle these events, the more I felt myself drowning in them. I was on a path of constant struggle.
I kept thinking that if I could just figure out how to make more money, all of these things could be addressed. I'd have more time and energy to come back and commit to the really important things in my life. We could afford to have another child, something I've sorely wanted. We could be on track for retirement. We could take a vacation, maybe even the honeymoon we hadn't been able to take. We could put more attention into our marriage. I just needed to put making money and stabilizing our security ahead of everything else for a little while. At the same time, my greatest fear was that I'd die before ever feeling like I'd really lived. My struggles, beginning with my mother's mental illness that became full blown when I was ten years old, seemed to define my life.
I kept trying to beat back the fear that had taken over my life by achieving more security, and life seemed determined to put roadblocks in my way. Nothing I'd been taught was working for me. There were avenues to make more money, but doing them left me feeling bored and deflated. As I began to confront the realities of my life I began to question how I was living, how my family and all my friends live. Who set it up this way? Does it have to be this way? What am I holding onto? What am I willing to let go? If I take away all the money and accomplishments and social expectations, what does a day look like? What does a life look like? What is it to just live, to be nothing or no one more than just Alicia in the Universe, a living creature on this living planet, hurling through a wondrous universe?
None of these questions gave simple or obvious answers. Instead, it became a process of uncovering what I am doing in my life, and why. In the past two years, I've put my priorities in order, piece by piece, allowing nothing to be equally important. Everything's had to go ahead or behind something else. This has allowed me to determine what's most important each day. I've learned how to schedule myself so that I'm not over-scheduled and overextended, when it seems like it's all too important or required to not do. It's led me here, to this experiment, this blog. What if I questioned every assumption about time, about how to live? What if I started living how I want to live now, even as my life has less and less security?
It's romantic to drop it all and travel the world, eating, praying, and loving. But I have a small child and husband, and $50 in my checking account. So how do you rework your life from the inside out? How do you take the life you have now, with everything you have going on in it, and live it differently anyway? Those were the questions I was asking when I decided to do this blog, and at the end of the year you and I will know how far I've come in answering them, and what I will have discovered along the way. Bon voyage!
