Here’s the situation: When plans don’t go the way I intended, I’m learning to make the best of them, but even though I can find happiness in the day-to-day and unpredictable moments, overall, I’m just not satisfied!

If I were to ask you what your biggest fears are, would you be able to easily identify them?  Some of the most common ones are the fear of public speaking and the fear of dying.  I am totally in agreement with the public speaking thing – thanks, but no thanks!  And though I’ve never really been afraid of dying, I have feared how I might die.  Alone, in my condo and nobody would notice until my neighbors called the police because of the smell coming from my unit.  That’s when they’d discover my body, half eaten by 42 cats.  Do I own a cat?  No.  Do I plan to own a cat?  Never.  But I feel like they find you at a certain point in your singleness and they’re probably already en route.

Ok, so having a bunch of cats eat my flesh may be a bit of a stretch, but if you were to ask me my biggest fears, for the longest time I would’ve said dying alone.  Or I guess rather, dying having never been married.  Even though the idea of being eternally single can still evoke bouts of panic, it seems to have taken a backseat to what I might actually be afraid of now:

1. Living an ordinary life.
2. Never truly being satisfied or content.

Ordinary is in the Eye of the Beholder

So what is an “ordinary life”?  I suppose everyone would have a different idea, but I fear the ordinary in a variety of ways.  I fear there never being anything more to my life than working Monday to Friday, 8 to 5, just to pay bills and afford some things I enjoy.  That doesn’t feel like living life, that feels like surviving life.

Ordinary makes me think of living a ‘small’ life, for lack of a better word.  For example, rarely venturing outside of your community or having a circle of friends that never grows.  Or ‘small’ like you’re so stuck in your little world that you never try anything new and you immediately reject ideas that might take you out of your comfort zone.  Don’t get me wrong – I am not a spontaneous, fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of girl.  I like information, my decisions are usually well thought out and I enjoy a good comfort zone, but I don’t want to get so stuck that I never stretch myself.  There is a world out there and I would like to experience it!

I also fear an ordinary life in that, I might have an unremarkable existence.  You hear people say stuff like “they are the best thing that ever happened to me” or “meeting them changed my life“.  I would like to be that for someone.  I want to make an impact.  I want my life to matter and have meaning, but right now, it kind of feels like it doesn’t.

Survey Says

I texted a few of my friends recently and asked them some seriously loaded questions.  Questions that unintentionally made them worry about my mental health!  Things like:

• Are you content or satisfied with your life?
• Do you feel like there’s something that’s missing?  Or something you’re striving for that you think will make you happier?
• Do you think you’re living out your purpose on earth?

I just wanted to know how people felt about their lives in comparison to me.  Are their jobs fulfilling?  Do they feel like they have purpose?  Or maybe they didn’t feel like they had purpose until they found their spouse or had children?  Is there still something inside of them wanting to get out or goals left to accomplish that they won’t be happy until they achieve?  Mainly, did they truly feel content or satisfied, or I suppose, settled in their lives?  And not that they had settled, but that they were settled; they had a peace about their lives.  Maybe I’m the only one who’s never satisfied with where I’m at?

Striving

That heading about sums it up.  It could be the perfectionist in me or the administrator, or the part of me that hates inefficiency, but I feel like there’s always room for improvement – in myself and in my surroundings.  So that’s what I do; I continuously strive to do better, be better, look better, write better, get fitter, save more, find a more efficient way, etc.

I know the word striving has it’s negative connotations, but I don’t necessarily see striving as a bad thing.  After all, it just means ‘to make great efforts to achieve a goal‘ and there’s nothing wrong with that!  However, I question whether I’m striving because I’m naturally more inclined to due to my personality, or if I’m really just striving to compensate for the areas where I feel that I lack.

The Purposeless Driven Life

When I look around me, I see a bunch of people doing amazing things.  Friends that have always had great aspirations and are actually accomplishing those things.  Lawyers and fashion designers and police officers and business owners.  Creatives and crafters and driven people!  I have a friend who’s a missionary and I have friends who might not think they’re doing anything special, but they are husbands and wives or fathers and mothers and they are cultivating loving homes and raising the next generation.  Their lives all have purpose!  And then I look at my life and wonder what the heck I’m doing here!

Unlike most, I never had great aspirations.  I honestly and naïvely thought I’d get married right out of high school and I guess I assumed that’s all there was to life; graduate and get married.  That was the path everyone I knew had taken, so why would I need other aspirations?  I never even considered things might not work that way for me.  (The fact that no boys were interested in me should’ve tipped me off though!)  I guess the only real plan I had was to go with the flow until I met my husband.

So, with no career goals in mind, I got a job at Kmart after high school and when they went out of business, I worked for my dad.  And when my dad’s boss retired and sold the company to new owners, they laid me off because they wanted to bring in their own staff.  When that happened, the original owner offered to pay for me to go to business school and it didn’t matter if I wanted to or not, my parents told me – you don’t turn down free education!  Nearing that graduation, the school would fax your resume to company’s looking to hire, which is how I got the job I still have to this day, so I didn’t even pick my career, it picked me!  I did take a small hiatus in the middle to pursue a few careers of my choice, but they didn’t pan out as I thought.

A solid 20 years went by before I started to grasp the reality that this marriage thing I was waiting for, legitimately might never happen for me!  If only for the survival of my heart, I decided to let go of that dream as best as I could (but obviously not entirely).  That’s when plan B surfaced.  A plan I am now striving towards.  It’s a new dream and a new goal and if I can achieve it, it might make me feel like I have purpose and validate my worth in all of the areas I feel that I lack.  It would pacify all of my fears of living an ordinary life and never being satisfied!

…but…what if it doesn’t?

Insatiable

What if this dream doesn’t become a reality?  What if I never end up with plans A or B?  Can I be content with neither?  Would I even be content if I had both?  Will I ever feel satisfied or will I always be striving for more?

Everything is wearisome beyond description.  No matter how much we see, we are never satisfied.  No matter how much we hear, we are never content.

– Ecclesiastes 1:8 (NLT)

I’m honestly not sure how to reconcile the possibility that my life may never reflect what I hope for and if that happens, how do you find contentment or satisfaction when you always feel there’s room for improvement?  And if you have to choose to be content, rather than actually being content, are you, in a way, just settling?  Or should we view the stirring in our souls as a nudge to keep striving towards a goal?  Maybe the dissatisfaction means we haven’t arrived yet and we need to keep working?  Maybe there is still more in store?  Who can know?!

Just as you cannot understand the path of the wind or the mystery of a tiny baby growing in it’s mothers womb, so you cannot understand the activity of God, who does all things.

Plant your seed in the morning and keep busy all afternoon, for you don’t know if profit will come from one activity or another – or maybe both.

– Ecclesiastes 11: 5-6 (NLT)