It’s just past 2:00 am, which, in my recent schedule of daily activities, is practically the middle of my day. I love sleeping in because it feels so vacation and weekend-like, but lately my schedule has become embarrassing even to me. I call it “bedtime creep” - bedtime goes from midnight to 3am to 4am and beyond, until one puts an end to it, as I resolve to do tonight.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a rich, fulfilling life. Yanking someone out of their comfort zone and taking away everything familiar will do that to you, I guess.
But really, what am I living for? What (aside from discipline) will get me out of bed at 9am instead of noon? What will fill this emptiness that I have been swimming in for the past two months?
When I first arrived in Boston, I thought I could hold my breath for the next four years, and return to California in 2009 (!) to resume “normal life.” Is that really the best use of what may be the best years of my life?
I have been reviewing a mental checklist of things that we do to fill our lives but end up falling short, i.e. friends, family, wealth, beauty, success, education, entertainment, travel, sports. Are these things the answer?
King Solomon captures it beautifully in Ecclesiastes (1:8-9). “All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing.
What has been will be again what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
In small group last week, we compared the philosophies of C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud. (Yes, Boston = Brains). C.S. Lewis writes of joy as “sehnsucht”, a sense of inconsolable longing which is more desirable than any other satisfaction.
“Our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is not mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.”
It’s comforting to know that an icon like Lewis struggled with this “real situation” as much as the next person. Realizing this missing piece is part of the journey, I guess. I hope I’m on the right track.
1 comment:
like being homesick. :) Yeah, best advice is to put some roots down cuz then the time will go by faster, you'll have fond memories of Boston, and really, who knows what might happen in the future.
But when we both move to LA, we can sit around, sip tea, and reminensce about the East Coast life and how much better it is on the West. Oh, and I get to play DJ basketball on your backyard court next to the swimming pool by the guest house.
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