Stop being sad.


Yesterday I woke up feeling a little off and by the middle of the day I was in a full-on state of depression. Nothing could get me out of the valley I was in and it felt as though I was determined to stay there.

Today is a much better day but the root cause of this foray into despair remains. I have recently come to fully grasp the state of my life and how it has essentially been brought back to the beginning of adulthood. That is to say that in some sense, I am right back to feeling like I did fresh out of high school. I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life so I punted and took the simplest path forward, to take part in the family business. I figured I’d get going and take a new path once one presented itself, but no path ever appeared so I maintained course.

Decades later, I had given so much of myself to the business that I could hardly recognize myself outside the context of that endeavor. And the rest is the history I’m trying to pick myself up from still. Two years ago now the primary reason for keeping the doors open died, so I pulled the plug on the business and resigned to take some time to figure my life out.

I’ve been spending most of that time shifting my service from the needs of the business to those of the household I’m a part of and the family I live with. But in doing so I’ve traded one evil I know for another, making zero progress on determining what my actual purpose is and focusing on those needs. Now I feel it is time to pull back on those efforts and truly focus on myself to establish who I am and what I want to be doing with my life.

At 42.

I realize it is somewhere in the middle of the potential game, and that many folks have made their greatest works after even 50. But that doesn’t stop me from feeling daunted by the prospect of starting from zero. I feel the same things I did as that naive young man, but with the wisdom to know that one fact remains true. I am capable of anything I set my mind to. It is that old nugget of inspiration that my folks gave me like so many supportive parents did for their kids. I honestly believe it’s still true, because I have seen first hand what a steady practice can accomplish in any field. Greatness is seldom spontaneous, it’s normally the work of many years behind the scenes.

The work I have been doing all of these years behind the scenes primarily revolves around my writing and I have to acknowledge it as my most profound gift. Transmuting that effort into money takes a lot of work, but the payoff is worth it for the way it makes me feel.

Travel is the other thing that brings me to life just thinking about it, so it follows that I need to write about travels. I also need to approach it as a business and make it the bulk of what I spend my days doing, the way I did with the traditional business I helped run with the family. I don’t need to go for broke, I’m already there.


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