It is 9:50 on a Monday morning and I haven’t even climbed out of bed except to pee. I feel like one of my teenage sons on a day off. I feel like a man whose life has put him in a position to hide from the mounting list of responsibilities he has, because putting my head down and ambling through hasn’t gotten me any further than laying here in bed has.
I don’t want to act like my life is bad–it isn’t. I will say that from a very young age I wanted to be everywhere and be everything and live in every different social grouping and situation I could. I actively worked to be someone who had it all. I later discovered that having it all means, generally speaking, having the best aspects of one thing–not everything. Having everything is both impossible and overwhelming. I discover and rediscover this every times I move through strata of my life. For example: I was at a 7 on 7 tournament yesterday to watch my son play a 20 minute game. From the time I left the house until the time I returned, the clock rang off 2.5 hours. In that time I was in a world that is totally different than my home life, my work life, watching from the sidelines of track and field, heck, even watching from the sidelines of a High School game. It was more in line with the past of youth football than anything else, and more foreign to my present self than I could have possibly imagined. Moreover, the time it took from my day and the possibilities of that day was astounding. I only was there for one game. The kid himself had already been there three hours before I even showed up. He’d played two or three other games in that stretch–not counting the all day affair of the day before. In short, that activity encompasses a life. You can’t have it all if you want to have that one thing.
This is what I am dwelling on as I lay here almost ten minutes into a blog and three hours into being awake and immobile on the last holiday before the real work begins. I ask myself. What is it I want? I am still waiting for an answer.