Friday, October 27, 2017

Deep Thoughts

I've been mulling over my life's purpose. Ok, maybe not that. Maybe I've just had mortality on my mind a lot. Not like a morbid fascination with death, but just a growing appreciation for how short life is.

Part of me realizes I have all these ideas or constructs in my head about how I want to be in x years. And it's more than how I want to be, it's what I want to be good at. I have a lot of things I've dabbled in over the years, and that's made me happy how many varied things I've done rather than what I consider a typical lifestyle. I realize there are 1000's of people who've done more than I have. 1000's of lives lived harder than mine. But still, I want to die with scars and stories and as few regrets as possible.

But with this wide variety of things I've done, my personality counters that variety with competitiveness. I'm not really the type that wants to beat the world into a bloody pulp, but I want to do something, and then improve and beat that old personal record or whatever into a bloody pulp.

I assume I'm not alone in this, but getting people to talk about that seems difficult. People seem to me to be guarded. Maybe I'm just not good at eeking the gooey centers out of people.

One of the things I've always wanted to be good at, and which is antithetical to my quiet introverted self, is to be a great story teller. My Grandpa K is a great story teller. I always love hearing his stories, no matter the subject. One of the tenets of that talent is to be able to convey something that the listener may or may not be interested in, and to get them hooked and want to hear the end of it. The end of a great story is like a joke. Sometimes it's completely out of nowhere, but it ties everything before it together and is ultimately satisfying.

To circle back, I've been thinking about the things I want to be good at. Mostly it's things I want to be good at, rather than things I want to get, which is in juxtaposition to how most of us (guilty here) spend our time. Maybe it's because I've achieved at least in my mind, an overabundance of material success that I'm able to move up Maslow's hierarchy and think about self-actualization. I'm careful to place too much happiness into the thinginess of the world. Contentment perhaps, but never hanging my hat on that slippery coat hanger of one-upmanship that seems so prevalent in today's society.

Things I want to be good at (and future blog topics):

Mountain biking

Playing guitar

Woodworking

That's a short list. But to be good at both of those consumes an inordinate amount of time and the occasional cash outlay, so I have to be real about how much stuff I want to be really good at. I figure I could probably mountain bike another 20 years, and play guitar and woodwork another 40+ if I'm lucky.

There's a lot of stuff I still want to dabble in across the way too. More like shorter-term goals. Maybe that'll be yet another post. This one is getting too long and heavy and Duke is going bonkers and crying at me. I guess he wants to play, which is all any of us wants, right?

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