If you're waiting all the time for something with no tangible signs of its arrival, and one day it just appears, has that thing taught you patience or simply been a giant pain in the ass*? This question occured to me at a stoplight this afternoon as I pondered where the heck my career is going, or perhaps more aptly, where it is, period. Maybe a "career" isn't as clear a term as "meaningful life work." I don't think my current situation is teaching me patience, because I don't ever really feel patient about it. At all. Truly ever. Sure, there is the process, which is to say, 90% of the reason why I am interested in exercising my creativity at all, but most of that is something that you can only salute gracefully from the shore of hindsight. In the moment it is thrilling and terrifying and hard. In the moment the salute is more like the kind of flailing one would do if trying to wave down a small plane while stranded in the middle of the woods. Sounds like fun just to write about it.

I don't think I devote nearly enough time to everything I want to do - all of my life's options for meaningful work. I can see myself going so many different directions, all of which require saying no to many things in order to say yes to others, and that just never seems to sit right with me. I wish it did but it doesn't. In this way, the filtration system of life's fertile ground I refer to as "tapping the sieve," becomes increasingly important. Discernment is an art, and thus, nuanced with shade, texture, and meaning. I hate saying no to any possibility and thus live much of my day to day with one foot out the door. Some could say one foot in the door is good too, but how great would it feel to walk the whole kit and kaboodle - mind, body, spirit - through the threshold? Does anyone know what that feels like? And how did you come to find your way?

*for which the growth may or may not have been worth it, if it existed at all