life just keeps happening

It is so easy to start living life as if it isn't going to start until a magic date when "X" happens--in my case, when we go on the road fulltime. As much as I try to resist this tendency, its an entropy, I slip slowly and inexorably into the state of living for tomorrow and forget to live NOW. I was brought grumpily into reality this morning by lack of sleep and irritation that my daughter and husband are sick again, the second time in 3 weeks. I was internally raging about how irritating life is, how dreadful that I wasn’t getting sleep and how life was getting in the way of me reaching my magic goal of travel---then I just started laughing. How silly it is to complain that life is getting in the way of life!

I reinforced to myself that one of my goals is to live NOW—how silly to miss out on all the stuff now—its all part of the fun. Being on the road isn’t going to stop them (or me) from getting colds. The planning and packing and cleaning now is part of the fun and part of life. Someday I might look back on this time now as that magic cusp time—the transition between the old life and the new. The time period in which my mental state started the transition to a new me, but I was still working in the old job.

And I have mentally started that transition—so many things just don’t seem as important as they once were. I just can’t get into a tizzy of worry anymore if some client gets frantic and upset…it isn’t that I’m not doing a great job or responsive to their needs—on the contrary, I find myself more organized, working harder and more directed than I have in a long time—but I don’t take the worries out the door anymore. I don’t wake at night, remembering minor details and gnawing at them with worry. I arrive at work, work hard, and leave work at work.
I’ve also noticed that I’ve begun worrying less what people think of me. I find myself just “being me” in situations that I previously would have censored myself more, been more of a chameleon and ‘what people expected’. An example: I went to a neighbors party last night and somehow immediately after I met two women there the conversation got stuck on the fact that I had stopped a market 40 miles away just to buy a special brand of beer. The conversation circled around beer for a few minutes, then was cut off as someone else arrived. Previously, my mental commentary would have worried that they thought me some sort of alcoholic, obsessed by beer. But last night, I simply didn’t care what they thought. I felt no need to explain myself beyond their initial questions and actually I realized that they probably forgot the conversation within 2 minutes and never gave it another thought—lol, unless they really were into beer and wanted the same seasonal ale!