When you’re little you think the answers will come easily. You’ll go to college [knowing what you want to do], fall in love [forever], get married [forever], have babies [two girls one boy] and live happily ever after. But you don’t consider that in between these life-altering milestones are gray areas. What if you go to college undeclared? What if your first love is still a love but not who you marry? What if you don’t want to get married right away? What if you don’t know where you want to live, let alone where to settle down? What if you find out you have a difficult time having children?
Too many what-ifs. Too many gray areas.
For someone as indecisive as me, those gray areas create a lot of nights of tossing and turning. We know the goal is to be happy, but how do you decide what makes you happy? And why is it that when you find one thing that makes you happy, the other pieces in your life don’t measure up?
For a long time I was happy in my romantic and social life, but unhappy in my career. Now I feel happy in my career, but question the durability of my relationships.
Why the gray area? Why can’t they come together, black and white, together?
You read books and blogs, see movies and tv shows – all of which you can scream at with an overwhelmingly sense of wrong and right for the character. You know when they should be doing X and not Y.
But real life isn’t written like a book or a movie. There’s no script to edit and no plot to amplify. You take it as it comes.. including the gray areas. How do you handle the mix of black and white?
hist adage says something like: “If you weren’t thinking about that which makes you unhappy, what would you be thinking about?”
Mind Overload 