Mentalechoes

I’ve been pondering for a while the next direction in life. Turning 40 has had some sort of profound affect on me in the way I view the world. It’s as if all of the value systems I was using suddenly underwent a massive shift in order in the same way that an apartment block will undergo a massive shift in order when an 8-on-the-richter-scale earthquake hits. Everything is picked up and thrown asunder, reassembling itself into something unrecogniseable, and awaiting reconstruction back into something meaningful.

Being in my 30’s was easy. The first few years of that decade was about launching myself into the big unknown wide world and experiencing everything for the first time, all up close and personal and raw. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing back then, but I didn’t really care either, each day was exciting and I was learning about the world as I went along. By my mid 30’s I’d found some stability and made a life in a foreign country and was exploring a new relationship that while I knew wasn’t ever going to be long term and stabile, it was fast and furious and intoxicating. The last part of my 30’s was this period of consolidation when I earned my right to live in the country I had chosen as home, and putting a foundation down that was security for now and the future. It represented the end of a time of being able to up and move at a moments notice, but then, I’d moved past that desire as well, so it wasn’t a loss.

Then I turned 40.

It’s funny, but sometimes lying in bed at night just before going to sleep I feel like all the lessons I’ve learned in the past decade are all coalescing into one place in my mind. They are pulling together into a framework that I can use like a ladder to take me somewhere. But I just feel like there are a few things I’m still not aware of to use that framework in any meaningful way. I’m still waiting for something. Which is frustrating when I feel like I want to be more in a hurry to get where all this is taking me.

If I leave myself idle for too long though, I start to realise that I’m bored with all the things in life that used to be interesting. I don’t mean bored in that I no longer like the hobbies I have for fun, or with the people I know. No I mean bored in that in my 30’s I was happy enough for life to lead me from one week to the next because I felt I had time and something interesting would come along. Now though, time is a premium, it’s something not to be wasted, so I get bored easily if weeks pass and nothing interesting happens. Perhaps that’s it; the thing that is boring is not the time between events, but the lack of direction that is still the way I live life. Being more in a hurry means actively taking a direction where I want to go, and make things happen, rather than wait for things to happen in a passive way.

Maybe the boredom is with the way I live life.

Something to think about.

Andy.