Am I Happy With Where I am?
Am I where I want to be? Boy, a seemingly easy question is surprisingly loaded and tough to grapple with. It is, in essence, asking if you are happy with yourself. In saying “yes”, you don’t want to imply that you are settling, but in desiring more, you don’t want to insinuate that you are ungrateful and an-accepting of yourself and your journey. So, I will answer this question by using the operative word “now”. I am happy where I am right “now” and thrilled as to where I am moving towards. I am excited about exploring and being in a new space continuously throughout my life. The important thing is, whatever space you are in, you need to own it and live in the present. How you spend your day today, is how you spend your life. Therefore, if you are pining for something new, daydreaming, living the “when I, then I’s” (When I get my man, my car, my body, etc, then I will be happy, proud, etc.). In my early years of middle school, high school, and college, I wore many hats and had many gigs. I was a toll booth attendant, a busser, a waitress, a golf-course beer chick, a childcare provider, a pet sitter, a lawn mower, a gardener, a writer, a doll shop saleswoman, a salon receptionist, an ice-cream scooper, a chiropractic assistant, and a migrant farm-worker protector. Through all of these dabbles, I proudly wore my hat (well, except at the ice-cream parlour when we had to wear a cone on our heads–it tainted my cool-girl image). The point is, none of these were my “dream jobs”, but I chose to find something dreamy about every one of them. I accepted the space I was in, embodied it wholly, gleaned the lessons I needed to learn (scooping is a great skill to have) and moved onto bigger and better things. It is easy to desire what others have to see assume that the grass is greener on the other side. At times, I regress and falter as well. Every time I ride my bike down the Hudson River and feel teh fresh air bolwing through my hair, my shirt billowing like the sails on the water, I wonder why I ever moved away from Manhattan to Brooklyn. However, when I have a meeting in midtown, and I have to fight through a sea of tourists and camaras, I slump down in my couch in my apartment in Brooklyn, feeling as if I narrrowly escaped death and question how I eeI have to believe that this embracing of life “now” and growing and evolving along the way, has actually paved the way for my actual dream job and destiny. By saying yes to where the arms are wide open to me, I have come to a place where I am happy where I am at on all levels–emotionally, physically, spirtually, geographically, and relationshiply (should be a word).
