What do you want to do next?
I am not very good at desire. There are lots of reasons why that is so, but I’ll not bore you with those. I prefer my confessions to rhyme.
I have always wanted things, that much is certainly true. But when life has consistently spun so dizzily beyond the reach of your control, what purpose does want serve? If it is written on your bones that it is not for you to choose which direction that you face, what does it matter then, whether you prefer one path over another.
I live positively, I think. I do the best with what I have and seize those opportunities I find. My arms are open to the world and my eyes are open too. It’s just that they are cast down at my feet, and those carry me forward in whichever way I happen to be going.
I have little care for what this way of living has deprived me of, not least because I can’t ever know what that might be. And there is much to treasure in the life I do have, especially the people I have found my way to in my aimless wandering. But I do care how it feels, to spend each day numbly moving through the acts of living with no authorial direction. I am lost, but it’s not a map I need. I hold the pen and paper in my hands and that is what I need — to remember that I am not the tourist but the cartographer.
It’s very hard, halfway through your life, to transform the way you think. But this is where I have begun, with remembering that there are other ways to live than this. It sounds like such a small thing, but I have started asking myself a question throughout my day, the same question, over and over: “what do you want to do next?” It reminds me I have options, it makes me listen to my desire, and it makes me choose.
The answers are not world-changing (my answer before I wrote this was that I wanted to do some washing up) but bit-by-bit, day-by-day they are changing how I feel about my world. It’s strange, for someone as prone to introspection, who is not afraid of what they think or what they feel, to only now be listening to what they want. Better late than never.
As it’s a Sunday, what I’d like to do next is tell you a story.
