Searching for Destiny

Today is one of those days that I am thrilled to not have anywhere I need to be other than my couch. There is a fire burning in the fireplace, the love of my life (my dog) is snuggled up next to me, and I am watching inch after inch pile up on my patio. It is the perfect day for a writer and I have excitedly been working on my first novel. Huge thing, right? I mean, they say everyone has a novel in them, but this story has been knocking around my brain for years and I thrilled by the opportunity to finally get it out of my head. I can’t help but wonder if anyone will read it when I’m done or will it sit in a drawer, unpublished and unread. I supposed it doesn’t matter any more than a painter having their paintings displayed in a gallery or a wood carver being able to sell their intricate renditions of Audubon images. It is the joy of the medium and the creative process that make it worth doing.

But I still wonder.

And I have more than ample time to wonder because as I type this, I am also madly seeking a way to pay the bills after leaving a horrendous work environment. It seems so unfair that one has to choose to decide between emotional health and financial stability but life isn’t about things being fair and choices always have to be made. Perhaps if I were a different person, I would have made the other choice – the choice to stay and suck it up instead of leave. But then, if I were a different person, perhaps I wouldn’t be in this situation at all.

I’m sure this is just the melancholy of my situation, but looking for work is a soul-crushing experience. Rejection followed by rejection, submissions followed by silence. In a way, this is probably valuable experience for the whole novel submission process, but I am certain that the lesson of resilience and tenacity is one that I have been learning for years and I’m a little tired of the lesson.

I keep wondering what part of this lesson is one that I need to learn better or overcome but am yet to find an answer. Maybe this was a way for God to push me to write more, to look in different directions for work, to reinvent myself or circle back to a me a used to be but have forgotten. According to my numerology report, I am on the cusp of changes that will lead me to the place I have always wanted to be…but then, they always say that, don’t they?

As I look back over my writings for the past few years, it seems that I’ve been here a lot – in this waiting space – waiting for something big to happen, someone new to come into my life, some big epiphany to occur – but I’m still here, waiting. Why is that? Is it that I’m somehow preventing the “big thing” to occur because of feelings of insecurity or unworthiness? Or are the feelings that I have now what everyone experiences and, I for some reason, am just spending too much time focusing on this? Who knows. Maybe all of that is true to some degree.

The thing is, I do believe we each have a destiny; a person that we are all destined to become. We each have a space in our soul that is to be filled with pieces of who we really are, the things that make us feel whole, real and complete. Some people find those things early in life. They find “the one” early in life and build a life with that person that at least appears to be what we all want. I actually know several of these people and for me, they are both inspirational and infuriating. I continually find myself repeating ‘why can’t that be me?” over and over in my mind. But I also know that our individual destinations – physical, spiritual and otherwise – are just that, individual. And what seems to be uniquely interesting about each of us is that we are assume that our destinies are, for lack of a better word, magical. I feel fairly certain that nobody who is reading this would expect their destiny to be that of a homeless person, someone afflicted with disease or mental illness or someone sitting in a jail cell awaiting their death. No, I suspect we all assume that our destinies are beautiful and that those in the situations I listed above simply missed that small branch of the road that would have led them to their true destiny.

Or perhaps the truth is that it’s the process of searching for our destinies that is actually our destiny. Perhaps, as the Buddhists might suggest, the journey is our destiny, not the final result. Maybe what I need to do (aside from finding a job) is to accept that where I am is my destiny and the struggle I am feeling is my inability to accept this and live in the joy of this space. If this is the case, what I need to do now is determine out how to live here, how to quit waiting for that one thing to happen that makes everything feel like it “clicks” and be content in the journey. And if I choose to be content in the journey, does that mean I stop striving for new things or is that part of the journey as well?

The logical answer is, of course, it’s all part of the journey. There is no map, no computer program or code that will let me put in specific criteria and spit out an answer to where I am supposed to live, what I’m supposed to do, who I’m supposed to have in my life. And while that might make things easier, I am glad such a thing doesn’t exist (yet). I will, for better or worse, continue this frustrating journey of job seeking and self-exploration and wait to see where it all leads.

Thanks for coming along on this little piece of my journey.