The Answer

Happy New Year! Can you believe that it is already 2010? I can’t. Seem like it was just yesterday that we were taking apart our old bus and remodeling it, leaving our farm and taking off in to the great unknown, the year was 1999 and almost everyone else was hunkering down with their Y2K supplies, us? we sold them with the house. I was a child. It also seems like eons ago. I am a wife, a mother, an adult. Enough reminiscing before I become all mooshy and this becomes another soppy New Year post not unlike my Christmas post which upon reading it again almost made me gag myself with a spoon.

New Years does bring on interesting topic up and I am sure you have already thought of this since if you didn’t make any I am sure you thought of making some or at the very least made fun of other people who were making them, that’s right, I’m talking about resolutions. I like to call mine “goals” but it is pretty much the same thing. SM (superman for those of you who don’t know, aka my hunka hub) and I talked a lot this past long weekend and made our lists, personal, together and community. Now I am supposing at this point you may be wondering where the angst is, where is the gripe, the sarcasm, why would you come here to read another piece on some New Year’s resolution that somebody else made? Good question. Don’t worry, you are not going to be privy to my New Year’s resolutions that is a MYOB area. So here it comes, the screed, the diatribe…

What is the deal with people wandering around b****ing about what they would love to do if and what they want to when moaning because they have to pay off such and such or do this and such, whining because they haven’t been given the opportunity or haven’t met the right person, blah blah blah. Seriously? The saddest part about all that is these people actually believe that those are the reasons that they are not doing the things that they truly want to do if it weren’t for the big if’s ands and butts, excuse me, buts, in their lives. I can not count how many times I have been told “you are so lucky to be doing what you are doing, I wish that I could do something like that.” I just watched several very funny movies and I will recommend them both to you here because they were the pathway to a great many laughs over the New Years weekend, “All About Steve” and “The Answer Man”, now you will have to bear through the first scene having a measurable amount of profanity in “The Answer Man” but don’t worry it goes up from there. There is a great line in the “Answer Man” where a young man has asked the guru of sorts why he can’t or isn’t doing what he wants to do with his life and the answer man gives him this answer (this is paraphrased) “you are doing exactly what you want to do because if you didn’t want to be doing it you would do something else.” BINGO! We are all doing exactly what it is that we want to do because if we didn’t want to be doing it we would do something else, we would find a way to become something different or to do something else. Too simplistic right? Not true you say? I did not say that doing something different wouldn’t cost you anything. On the contrary doing something different usually costs you everything or pretty darn close! It also is a brain cruncher because to do what you want to do generally leads to having to become creative and sometimes that leaves our couch potato brains a little mushed. You see we have been socialized in to accepting norms, patterns behavior and ways of living that define who we are and what we are worth. If you live outside of those people may desire what they see that you have but there is no desire to go through what you went through to get there.

In fact I have actually delivered invitations to people to do something that they had been dying to do that was their dream only to have them laugh and shrug it off as I stood in incredulous amazement. This thought seems to be one of my favorite and most frequent thoughts “SERIOUSLY?!” normally to be followed by either a blank look, which is a very difficult accomplishment for me since I tend to to be an open book, or more often than not, a raised eyebrow.

I don’t see the point of setting goals and making resolutions that I am not going to follow through. Why just dream? Dreams get you nowhere! At their best they are catalysts at their worst nothing but a vapor leaving behind the smell of acrid smoke that won’t wash out of your mind or soul. Now on the other hand I very well may fail one or more of my goals but I will fail because I tried and I will go down swinging.

There is a quote that hung on our refrigerator for years when I was a child, it was on a business card that my parents received from someone and has been repeated many many times in this household “If you will do for two years what most people won’t do you will do for a lifetime what most people can’t”. Two years? I can do almost anything for two years, and how do I know? I’ve tried! And failed! And succeeded! And I know because whatever it is I will have chosen to be there because if I don’t want to be I will do something else.