Just do the stuff

As of late, my thoughts have been swirling around my penchant for personal purpose. Specifically, I am getting older, and I am running out of excuses and training experiences. My master's degree should be complete in May. I feel it rushing at me. In recent years I have learned to husband my wife, care for finances, manage my personal life, and work a corporate job in order to pay the bills. In the back of my mind I have always told myself I am getting ready for "the thing" I am going to do with my life. I am sure that this is a fantasy a bit like the hunt to find "the one" you were destined to be with. As I wrap up the master's, I do not have many other educational routes to go to prepare myself for living the life I want to live, to give it for what I have deemed worthy. At some point, I will no longer be able to say I am in the preparation stage of life. I will look down at my feet and go, well, here I am. I guess this is what I am doing with my life.

For many, feeling some sense of purpose beyond career and family is an alien sensation. They are marvelously content living life, surviving, learning, loving, reproducing who they are in a child, savoring their moment, and growing old. I wish I could group myself with them. I feel like the oddball, the ridiculous dreamer, not discontent with life, but wanting something beyond the words I currently have available to me.

I am not sure how to maintain my free agent "dreamer" status and play the game. I will be spending my life, clearly, and irrevocably on the life I choose to accept. Most of what I have in my life I feel deeply grateful for, the company of a extraordinary wife, the reckless love of God, a personal life of strength and vulnerability, beautiful family on both sides, and the freedom to have this dialogue/ monologue/ blogging to myself moment. So it is not out of a list of regrets I feel compelled to walk in this crisis moment.

I want to do the stuff. I want to be able to look at a moment and recognize that I was made for that moment and the moment for me. A significant portion of my life feels like a middle school square dance. Someone up front is calling the moves and either you jump in, no matter how awkward you look, or you sit on the side and sip punch and talk about how silly the other dancers look.

It is not pride but a sense of personal obligation and responsibility I feel. I have been given much. I know there is strength inside of me to share with others. I just have so few outlets for it, juggling school and work. Though, as I said before, a defining moment is approaching where I either can say I am doing the stuff, or I am just another dreamer, another passionate cry from the sidelines for change, but ultimately lost in the tide of opinions.

Perhaps it is my youth, or my age, but I still believe that people can make a difference in their communities. I hope to be one of those who does something. I do not need it to make headline news or make me rich. I just want to do something that does not get erased with each quarter's stock projection or the turning of a new semester. I want to be willing to attempt something bigger than my fear for failure would dictate. But most of all, simply, I want to be a person who does what I talk about.