I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
What is my purpose? I asked myself this morning. What am I doing here anyway?
I have such a lovely life. I am retired at age 58, with enough financial security that I don’t need to work again. I spend my days writing, painting, and developing financial management practices and systems. I have three adult children all making their way independently, and I am close to each, in the way that works individually for them. My parents are still healthy and cognitively with-it, and I live near them. I have close friends that I rely on, and that I support.
But a nagging voice inside says: you should be doing more. You should write a book, or get a job, or run an art exhibition. You should write regularly on your Substack, and monetize it too.
That’s the voice of my inner slavemaster talking to me, promoting the ideals of the achievement society, also known as the burnout society.
Is this path I am on, is it enough? Where is it going, anyway?
In Crones Don’t Whine: Concentrated Wisdom For Mature Women, Jean Shinoda Bolen writes:
Following a path with heart, staying juicy, and being content are related. I have paraphrased Don Juan’s teaching to his apprentice Carlos Castaneda ever since I read them in the 1960s. My version: There are many paths to choose from, and none of them go anywhere. Yet you must carefully choose which path you will take. If you choose a path with heart, it may be difficult, but there is joy along this path, and as you travel, you grow and become one with it. If you choose a path out of fear, anxiety travels with you, and no matter how much power, prestige, and possessions you acquire, you will be diminished by it.
That idea soothes me: “there are many paths to choose from and none of them go anywhere.”
This path I am on, it goes nowhere except to a place of joy (and sometimes grief or dissatisfaction or anxiety or a sense of peace). I find joy in making my basement suite available to my youngest child as she launches a career in social work. I find joy that I live close enough to both my parents that I can do breakfast every two weeks with my father, and lunch on the other alternate Tuesdays with my mother. I find joy in finishing a new painting and then hanging it up where, when someone comes visit me, they might notice it and exclaim “Oh! That’s beautiful!” and feel inspired by the opportunity to create (or just feel happiness to see me creating). I find joy in walking the dogs each morning, in wearing my cat Carlos in a sling in the morning when I blog so he can get his daily dose of cuddles, in occasionally hosting temporary foster dogs when they need a landing place.
It is a path of heart truly. Daily my heart has her way.