All of the frustrating loves

I wonder how many things I’m in love with without even knowing it. I wonder how many of those things I will come to find out that I love, and how many I will never know about. I’m so full of love and am always learning to love new things and sometimes I wonder what future loves are in store for me down the road.

Part of me is not so sure that I would want to know because my passion is already split in so many different directions that I am constantly frustrated that I can’t focus on one thing long enough to accomplish something great with it. My only hope is to accomplish something great. I’m not one of those women who can just reproduce and be satisfied that I brought life into the world and feel like my purpose is fulfilled. No offense to those women, but it’s just not good enough for me because almost everybody can reproduce and most people do. I want to do something more. But I think to do that, I need to focus on one thing and that’s tough.

A lot of times I try to convince myself to focus on music. It is what I always go back to and what I am arguably most passionate about. I tell myself to read about music, write about music, keep up with my vinyl collection, but then I tell myself that it’s all without a purpose. I think by never learning to play music, I blew my chance to be involved. I don’t think I could ever even be a music writer if I’m not a musician myself because music is one of those things that you have to sort of experience hands on to know enough or be taken seriously in the industry.

Then I think about how much time I spend on beer. How much joy I get when trying a new beer or get my hands on a rare one that I’ve been on the lookout for. How many hours I put into researching, rating and compiling lists about it. It truly does give me joy and I could happily dedicate my whole life to beer. But my company already has a beer writer and even if I moved on and tried to do it somewhere else, I don’t think anyone would take me seriously.

Nature has always been a top priority of mine too, though. I’m a self-described political activist and I care most about the environment and conservation because once the world dies (which it will) all the other political issues that people are worrying about will be nothing. Nothing else matters unless we can keep the earth alive. I always wanted to write about this stuff because I want to do something that matters and feel like whatever I spend the majority of my life doing needs to be important and make a difference or I will feel like a failure.

I’m greedy for so much knowledge that I don’t even need. I want to know everything about history. I want to know every last fact about every president and all the religions in the world and about how cheese is made and how each kind is different from the others. I want to learn about volcanoes and dinosaurs and the solar system. I want to read about the histories of every county and about the lives of writers.

I want to know it all but it really is useless I go on Jeopardy and win a lot of money because when I die, I will just take all of that knowledge with me without doing anything with it and my life will have just been wasted on learning and not doing.

Even my writing is moving in so many different directions at once. You wouldn’t believe how many short blogs like this that I have started or are halfway done or one sentence away from being done but I don’t have the passion to complete because if I don’t have the motivation to finish something, I am not going to just finish it for the sake of finishing because then it won’t be perfect.

I have ideas that are so spectacular that part of me wants to give them away to somebody who I’m sure would actually execute and complete them and probably do it much better than I could anyways.

I think I love too much, if that’s even possible. It’s too much because I spend too much time in the intersections looking at every possible avenue, but never taking the journey. My passion is my own favorite quality but it can also be a curse. These things give me life, but they frustrate me. My plate is too full of delicious delicacies that I will never have the time to finish or share. I don’t think I could fit any more. 

But then again, I think if there is something out there that would make me feel happier, more fulfilled or be a better person I would want to be aware of it.

I mean, a few years ago, I would have never expected to love golf so much. Seriously, who would have thought? Now it is single-handedly the thing that keeps me the happiest in the good-weather portion of the year to the point that I even watch all the tournaments on tv and have a favorite golfer.

If I had missed out on golf … well I would have been fine because I didn’t know I liked it, but I’m so much more of a complete person now that I have it. I wouldn’t want to miss out on something that makes me feel like that.

I’m more than a quarter of the way through my life, which means that by now I should know all the things I like and don’t like but it’s not true. I’m constantly finding more things to love – and that is a good thing, but also kind of scary because, again, I’m already a quarter of the way through my life and haven’t done anything with any of it yet.