Meanings

Get up, write, walk, eat breakfast, shower. Errands and bill-paying, buy some stocks or hit a thrift store, dredge up dinners for a couple of days. Tutorials and classes. Read an hour, sleep, get up and start over again.

Not exciting, this life right now. I thought I'd have adventures when I began this quest. I thought I'd get my own little Antiques Roadshow Classic moment - the pretty but dull-looking wall hanging that turns out to be a $100k Navajo chief's blanket, or the $5 yard sale chair that's a two-hundred-year-old Hepplewhite worth a thousand times what I paid for it. Or maybe I'd dig up a 1870-S half-dime in my back yard - not in perfect condition, you understand, but able to be cleaned up and sold for about half its "mint" value (not enough on which to retire, maybe, but enough to become the fund in six years). Or maybe the stock I buy at $2 a share doubles and triples and suddenly it's worth two hundred times what I paid for it. I'd even settle for making it to one of the local mineral club's digs and find a nice chunk of grossular garnet! But no! I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, cleaning up my kitchen and my finances, clearing out my house and my predilections.

Boring, boring, boring - this first year is Boring with a capital "B!" And I'm tempted - practically salivating! - to skip this groundwork-laying year and go straight to diving for gold in the Bahamas and digging for diamonds in South Africa. But ain't gonna happen. It can't. Yes, I have years behind me, years in which I learned how to handle credit better and invest automatically and use my job skills for maximum value. Yet I still haven't paid off those credit cards, have I? I haven't funnelled all of the excess into the proper places. I haven't gotten mature enough about spending to even handle the kind of money I want to find, steal, or win.

Funny that we ooh! and ahh! over a fabulous meal, or a bumper crop of artichokes or corn, or a beautiful paint color on our walls. We adore (even expect!) to drive long stretches of pothole-free road, watch a flawless performance ... even make that perfect love with our partner. But none of these things, as a rule, happen by accident but by effort - lots and lots and lots of effort. Background. Preliminaries. All those things that never get the praise. When was the last time we applauded the foundation of a home, right?

I'm still growing. That's the reason for the lack of excitement and the surplus of philosophy, I think. No matter how I try to avoid it, the truth is that this blog doesn't just chronicle my (seemingly) fantastical odyssey but actually changes the way my mind works. Helps me focus on what's important. Makes me think before I act. Because if I screw up, I tell you about it, and that makes it more ... real somehow.

Oh, I know it's all real, whether I write about it or not. I do. Life is not a dress rehearsal. Everything done can never really be undone no matter how hard we try. Blah, blah, blah. I get it. But I also know that what is done can be ... shifted. The script of my life is continuously rewritten. Every day, every hour, every moment, revised and updated and changed, by "fate," by God, or by me, until the day I die. And though I cannot control what happens to me, I damned well can control my reaction to whatever "it" is, and, more importantly, where I go from that moment on. That's the purpose. That's the meaning. That's the reality.

And right now, though I want to grab my loupe, it's time to lift another cinderblock instead.

Sigh.

And yay.