Thursday, March 4, 2010

As I was driving home from work tonight, drained after hours of basking in the sickly white glow of spreadsheets, I asked myself a question. It’s been a long week, and when you combine that with an empty road, bleary eyes, and a darkened sky, you get contemplative. I thought about the past few days, the coming weekend, last year and the next, and then I steeled myself for those three words: Is this it?

It’s a painful, yet wholly necessary query that should be asked regularly, I believe. It suggests discontentment, possibly unwarranted, and it’s a question that can inconvenience you, uproot the familiar, if you go the distance with it. But it can also save you from being stuck on loop. There are better words, I’m sure. Were I more entrepreneurial, I’d probably be uttering three different ones–Here’s my plan–but that’s a mindset I simply don’t possess.

By and large I’m content on most days. Job, house, car, savings, creature comforts–I’m fortunate, certainly. But at the same time, I’ve always wondered what it means to be truly “passionate” about something, be it a hobby or work. I’ve never really understood the word. It tends to evoke images of rescuing whales or some such shit, all for great personal satisfaction and little reward.

Invariably I imagine donning sackcloth and renouncing worldly riches to pursue my life’s calling, and that’s just not me. I like nice things. I like food. I like money, and were I to stumble upon a way to parlay something I enjoy into a revenue stream, well, fuck yes I’d sell out in a heartbeat. That’s every person’s dream, I suppose–to stop asking the question, my question, and instead declare, “This is it.”