Lately I have been thinking a lot about this fantastic lifetimes comic that my friend sent to me. My brain is so fuzzy because I can’t recall if I’ve already posted about it. If I have then apologies for repeating myself. If I haven’t then yay, some new material! For some reason I find this comic to be so elegant and succinct. I love the idea that over the course of your life you can re-invent yourself so many times and that while life can be short, in some ways (if you are lucky and don’t die prematurely), there is time to do a lot of things. 

I am not sure if it’s being in my 30s, or having had time to think and talk to people, but what matters is – regardless of how it looks on the outside – to know where you’re going and what you are doing on the inside. It is true that maybe people looking in will not fully understand what you’re trying to achieve if you don’t have a simple to explain job. When I was a lawyer, that part was really easy. All I had to do was say that I am a lawyer and everything kind of fit into place for the person you’re talking to. We are all intellectually lazy and saying you’re a lawyer is an easy short-cut. They already have a script of how your life works and the questions pretty much stop at that. I am equally as guilty of this. Yet, because there were no external questions, all I did everyday was wrestle with internal questions of who I wanted to be and what I was doing with my life.

Now, it is reversed. I have a very hard time articulating what I do every day and what I am trying to achieve. To many of my acquaintances I must look like a housewife. I work from home. They can’t really pinpoint what I do with my hours. Hell, I must look like an incredibly under-achieving housewife since I don’t even have a baby that I am taking care of. Even my own family doesn’t fully understand. Yet for the first time in a long time, I feel finally an internal clarity that wasn’t there before. Even a couple of months ago, when I first started I felt very uncertain and unsure of how everything would shake out. Nothing is 100%, but at the very least now I feel centered. This gives me my own source of confidence in the face of questions from the outside world.

Perhaps perfect peace – the way Buddhists seem to achieve – is not really what I was meant for. Maybe when I am into the last few lifetimes. For now, there’s an endless amount of work that lies ahead and not having external peace is actually a good thing because I would rather have an internal center and clear path over an external box that my insides don’t fit into.

This is my third lifetime and I am finally on my way. Round three … FIGHT!

-W.