Dwelling

I am a dweller.  I dwell on things way too much.  I don’t hold grudges, but I dwell.  I want to please other people and I think entirely too long about how things turned out.

It feels so good to admit this because I’ve been thinking of what this feeling is for the past 10 months.  Turning the thought over and over in my mind.  As one opportunity after another this year disappeared in my outstretched hands, I found myself dwelling.  Inevitably I got over it and picked myself up by my bootstraps and tried again.  I think I gained a bit of patience and lowered my expectations in the process.   I wish I could say that the experiences from this year would have stopped the dwelling.  Today I am reminded that I am still a dweller.  I guess maybe we are all just a work in progress. 

I am on this sort of battleground with myself stuck somewhere in the middle.  On one side, I have routine, plans and expectations.  I crave schedules, school planners, a perfectly decorated and clean house, and reliability in my job, life and relationships.  I hate confrontation and arguments of any kind.  I worry about what people think of me all the time.  I wish I thrived off of the unexpected, last minute invitations and being casually 10 minutes late.  I wish I was like Andrew and didn’t care what people thought or said about me.  However, I am not that person and that is ok.  We are who we are.  But on the other side of the battlefield I have this love for adventure, being free from 401ks and 9-5 work schedules, and pursuing a career in what I love instead of what I have to do.  This is the greedy side of me.  The side that wants to have my cake and eat it too.

This lovely summer Nor’easter that we are experiencing in Nantucket has me dwelling.  I have lost two huge days of work in the process and I am inevitably dwelling. And by dwelling I mean that I am angry at the weather that I can’t control, stressed at the loss of money and how I will make up for it in the short 5 remaining weeks of summer, considering a complete job change that does not depend on weather and wishing that I was a salaried worker who didn’t have to worry about such problems that plague me today.  It’s like this annoying Justin Beiber song that keeps playing in my head over and over again.  I tell myself to move on, but I can’t seem to press the stop button fast enough.

I think I am on the right track though.  The track of knowing myself and figuring out how to make a treaty on this battleground.  In the end I do love what I do.  I wouldn’t trade my life with anyone else (except maybe Jimmy Buffett).   I think its ok to accept the fact that I dwell.  With all this dwelling that I do, I am still a believer.  A believer that we can have it all if we work hard.  That there are many possibilities in life and for all the ones that don’t work out, there will always be ones that do. Sometimes dwelling might be a good thing.