Life Limits

Something I have always struggled with is where I want to go in life. I have absolutely no clue where I want to be when I'm 30 and married with a toddler running around the house. Hell, I don't even know where I want to go next year when I finish my college diploma.

Yes, I have a rough idea of what I might want to do, but the endgame is unclear.

In a way, I'm glad that I don't know what I want to do. The idea of just picking a specific job or a place to go and then working laboriously until I reach that goal sounds tiresome, and I'll be damned if I hate my job in 10 years time because I rushed into it at 19.

Although I don't have a specific goal, I have a passion and a dream and I'm never giving up on it. I love art. I don't just love art. I love looking at art, buying art, creating art, and sharing my art with the world. Even within art, I love so many different things about it. The way I work is constantly changing. One day I might be working on a watercolour painting and designing my own characters, and the next I'm writing a film and recording scenes in the streets. I am constantly hopping from one style to another, picking and choosing the mediums as I please.

Right now I'm in between different things. I spent the last couple of months researching and writing a film before actually creating it. It was an incredible experience and I continued to learn new things every day I spent working on it. However, being solely focused on this has resulted in a serious level of neglect elsewhere. I've lost touch with all the traditional art techniques I know, and it was only today that I was able to push myself back into it and start practicing again.

Something that I strongly believe in is to pick a path instead of a destination. By picking a path, you are always free to turn around and backtrack or stray slightly and experiment with something different . You are free to learn about where you are and who you are and why you are where you are. By picking a path, you grow and develop, and as you reach the end of that path you will be where you want to be. By picking a path, you have complete control over your life. You make your own rules.

But what if you take careers out of the question?

Whenever anyone asks what you want to do, the automatic response is to give a career name. They'll ask you how you'll get there and you'll reel off a list of qualifications you need and a rough guide of how many years it will take you to get there.

But what else do you want?

Do you want to be a parent? Do you want to have pets? Do you want to live in the city with all the buildings and bright lights, or are you more tempted by the serenity of a countryside home? Nobody ever asks us these things and it's like everything we are and everything we stand for is all defined by where we go in life.

But it's not.

Our lives are so much more than that. Our personalities are more than just our job role. If we all live our lives just focusing on this one aspect of ourselves, will we really be happy when we get there, or will we cry when we realise all the things we neglected or left behind to make that one thing happen?

Life is not a race. You don't have to put a time limit on it.