ReAlignment for 33

I have been feeling mopey this week.  Low on energy and demotivated.  It happens in my life from time to time with various levels of negativity.  Usually this occurs when I am in the middle of an extended life experience and my mind is not busy syncing new information.  Especially once my job has become routine and I know how to do my day to day work.  It is something I need to start addressing because marrying and starting a family comes with increasing levels of stability and routine.  So this morning I took a big picture look at my life.  Four days before my 33rd birthday with a coffee and a pan con tomate.

“What matters to me (with wisdom)”? I looked at that question penned onto my page and figured it was a pretty good way to go about looking at my existential angst.  Other years I would have asked myself “What is most important in life?”  “What is my purpose?”  Healthy questions, but they neglect the importance of admitting my desires and needs.  During less healthy years my guiding question was always “What will make people like and accept me?”

   As I age I am purposefully moving away from my past perspectives.  Even some that were cloaked in spiritual words.  It’s a messy craft but it fascinates me.  Keeping wisdom, discarding pseudo-wisdom.  Keeping ideals, admitting inabilities.

The coffee was hot and fresh as I jotted down what matters to me in my life.  I told myself to think with wisdom and not to let my discouragement produce a discouraged perspective.  This was for guidance.  This was a realignment.

Life with God (thankful for it, embrace it).  This one is my starting point.  Living in connection with the divine being, the one displayed in Jesus centuries ago.  Worship God flows from the first.  Since God is more awesome than anything else around, responding with words and lifestyles that honor God. 

Next I put See My Identity.  It felt a little selfish to put it so high on the list, but seeking honesty it felt like it had to be next.  I have to know who I am to live out the rest of what matters to me.  And if I see my identity I live in my community without trying to manipulate people into creating my identity. 

Love Jeni.  To me this is an amazing pleasure and a massive responsibility.  To love the one I found as a partner.  I cherish her and I seek to bless her.   I am stunned by the extreme happiness her love has brought me!

I think those four show my most immediate values as I turn thirty three.  If I stop the reflection there it is an accurate but incomplete view.  It’s missing one massive piece and two subpoints in the mental puzzle.

Love My family and My People.  It is one step less immediate than my day to day life with my partner, but it is of massive importance.  I cherish the family that raised me and stays with me to this day. I cherish some beautiful people I met as I grew, and the new family I married into this Summer. 

Then the subpoints that give guidance to the earlier values: Prepare and Provide, Enjoy Pleasures.  As a husband I want to plan our family’s  future wisely with Jeni and I want to focus my energy on providing for that future.  Skipping luxuries, choosing expenses.  I want to get ready for what is to come.  And lastly enjoying pleasures.  I don’t want them to drive my life, but I also want to enjoy good pleasures.  Some time playing guitar, a hike in the woods, a book that absorbs my mind.  

I took my breakfast plate up to the manager and paid for my meal.  Last week I told him I lived next door so this week we chatted as I paid.  I had not killed the negativity in my mind, but I had shone a light onto the darkness.  I am going to keep that light shining because my 33rd year is going to be full of life to live.

As a second perspective, I add here a quote from Tolstoy’s 1859 novela Family Happiness.  I learned of it from the video telling of “Into the Wild” and it has clung to me since I first heard it.  It is from the perspective of an older man on the cusp of starting a relationship:

“I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books , music, love for one's neighbor - such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps - what more can the heart of a man desire?”