The Elusive Age.

I wish I knew what this thought meant, but I have no way to articulate it, except to repeat it over and over again. I want something new. Am I thinking clothes? Or house decor? Or a new design for my blog? Or a new haircut? Or… (_fill in the blank?_) No, it’s deeper than material things. I wish I knew what it meant. And why.

Perhaps it’s an emerging pattern of nostalgia. Every year at this time I remember that I spent a Fall in Europe wandering and reading and writing and learning to my heart’s content. You can take the phrase ‘travel bug’ literally. It’s an itch that must be scratched and when you don’t it gnaws away at your thoughts, convincing you that if you could just go someplace new, everything would be better.

But am I now incapable of being happy where I am? I am happy. I have a wonderful husband and a good job doing something I actually like, and I have a great group of friends and family. I just have this restless feeling. Like I’m waiting on an elusive “new”, an elusive “better,” an elusive “different”, and I don’t know when or where or how I may find it.

A lot of people my age feel this way. A lot of people who were once my age felt this way, and they either did something great or resigned themselves to the waiting and the wanting. How will I deal with it? How will my friends deal with it? Our days aren’t meant for biding our time or waiting for something to come to us. We’re meant to reach out and grab hold of what we want. But what if we don’t know what that is? How do we find out what it is? What is the “great” that we might do? I’ve just asked a lot of big questions, many of which may not be answerable. It’s better than not asking, though. It’s better than not contemplating what it is we’re doing. I found this quote the other day, and I really hope that I can find a way to live up to it, and that my peers do, too. I have a feeling that this is what we want, and what we are most afraid of.

“What we are is God’s gift to us. What we become is our gift to God.” -Eleanor Powell