Lately I've been thinking about how the existentialists got things right. I'm struck these days by the absurdity of our lives - the absolute craziness of our careening trajectories. Blink - you're five, feeling thirty. Blink again, you're in high school acting thirty. Blink blink, you're past thirty, still with no better idea of what you want to be or even who you want to be than when you were five. And does it matter? The minutes will pass, shooting quickly past days and months and years until a sunset stops you, stuns you, humbles you and your groping brain searching for personal meaning. Yes, we create it, but yes, it's also just ... not there. Not anywhere it can be discovered or stumbled upon or even worked toward.
I do think we're living through a new era, where adulthood is not coupled with a career, in the true sense of that word, complete with a goal and strategic shifts toward some step on a ladder you chose when you were in your twenties. Now we hop from job to job like so many lily pads, hoping for more shade or more flies or less wobble.
It is strange to feel you have gifts but no avenue to get paid to use them. It is disconcerting and unsettling and fundamentally questions your worth as an adult.
I can already sense how little sense my life is going to make in another thirty years. I could be wrong, of course. I might be heading to the culmination of all my disparate experiences that will resolve into crystal clarity how each contributed some vital skill toward some perfect, well-paying, secure job.
I just don't see it. Maybe I won't until it gets here.
