Follow Your Heart

I’ve been bitching and moaning about my job, having to work, not being able to write, wanting to retire.  As I’ve been obsessively writing up budgets with

multiple scenarios, trying to find a feasible, doable, plan of action, a tornado suddenly kicked up from my running incessantly in circles and in its wake a clearing, an obvious point, has unexpectedly emerged – I want it all.  I want everything I have now; my house, the ability to maintain at least my paycheck to paycheck lifestyle as I have forever, and to not have to work.  All my plans were to keep everything the same and to still add even more. 

But it can’t be the same.  I’m saying what I want to do, my singular, angst-filled path I desire, to not work, devote myself entirely to writing, but my plans haven’t realistically accounted for that goal.  They’ve instead focused on how I can write and still have what I have now.  I have assumed everything has to remain the same, which led me right

back to the impossibility of all my schemes.  So I just gave up and decided something will have to inevitably emerge, reveal itself to me before I ended up in the gutter, because I sure wasn’t having any luck making the numbers add up.  And that strategy may have actually worked.  If my true goal is to write, then everything else has to be negotiable.  I have to downsize, give up what I have, sacrifice for my aspirations. 

This means giving up my home.  Selling it and moving somewhere, into something that I can afford on a retirement budget.  It’s my primary financial burden that doesn’t have a realistic end in sight.  I can’t afford to keep my

home and do what I say I want to do – quit my job, not work, and write exclusively.  I was contorting every which way to try to keep the status quo.  The only plan I came up with was a tactic wherein I would still quit, get out of the god-awful job, but work somewhere part time to make up the difference.  So – let me get this straight – I would quit a secure job that pays decently enough, where every day I stay I’m more vested in my retirement benefits, to then go get another job that won’t pay as well and won’t do a damn thing for me except keep me afloat?  Why would I quit a job to just then go get another job with less payoff?  Huh? 

I didn’t want to sacrifice anything.  I always assumed I can have it all, no, must

have it all, or the plan isn’t worth working for.  I can get out of loan and credit card debt in about 12 months if I maintain my amended payment schedule I came up with.  That’s pretty good.  Well, except for one loan I’ll clearly end up dying with.  I have about $120k still left in student loans that I just keep waiting for Obama to come through and pay off for me.  But he hasn’t stepped up yet and isn’t returning my phone calls. 

I can’t have it all.  Not if I am crushingly honest, and actually follow my goal, my dream, instead of just giving it lip service.  I have to give up my home that I

love; where I finally hung pictures on the wall, planted trees I’ve waited years to watch grow up, established gardens, buried my cat.  Where I stood and made a vow I would never run away again – that I would stay and commit, once and for all. 

Am I running away?  Or am I finally being realistic, logical, true to my coveted course?  I am leery, suspicious.  I have a fairly impressive track record after all.  Is my heart scaring me into bolting again, to keep running so that “it” can’t catch me – or …

 
Maybe that tiny little stent has opened my heart, to not only adequate blood flow and oxygen, but also to reality.  A realistic assessment of what my goals really are and what it will actually take to achieve them.  What if it’s suddenly open to previously unconsidered possibilities?  Open.  Everything pulsing in with boundless options, infinite opportunities, showing me I really can live this life the way I want.  If I just pick and choose, keep my goal in mind, adjust whatever needs adjusted to be able to keep on that course.  Can I listen

to and follow my heart as it struggles, still convulsing, trying so hard to recover – to set me on my right path?
 
If this possibility is true, and I fervently hope that it is, then I think I finally got the memo.