Clarifying my goals

I'm really writing this after the fact, because when I got home at 10, I just had a snack and read some Brain,Child and went to sleep. But we can pretend.

Tonight (ahem) I hosted a group meeting on "Creating Balance in Family Life" with two life coaches. They had us working on clarifying our values since misunderstanding our values -- or setting priorities that don't, in fact, fit with our values -- is a lot of what causes people to get frustrated and to feel unfulfilled.

I came to the conclusion that I value complexity. I just do. I don't like things that are simple. They are not interesting to me. I like competing themes and ideas in literature, film, art. I like to be involved in a lot of things. I like to see connections across disciplines and from one aspect of my life to another.

This doesn't mean I can't develop mindfulness, or that I can't train my brain to appreciate one thing at a time. I think that is healthy. But it means that it's silly to say I'm striving for things to be peaceful, for that elusive "one day" when everything will be cleared out and have its specific place and time. I like messiness. It makes me feel alive, involved in life.

There's part of me that has always known this. I recognize that I have a fear of becoming like my mom who was depressed and didn't have a whole lot of passions, interests or relationships when I was growing up, at least not when I was really young. So this can go kind of pathological if I let it.

But it's also just plain who I am, someone who likes to be busy and have lots of irons in the fire. I wouldn't keep making that happen if it weren't true. I wouldn't have started my fifth personal blog here if I didn't feel like I needed many spokes from my center.

So, although I sometimes complain that my husband doesn't take initiative -- and I pretend that I want him to have passions that he pursues and schedules and prioritizes instead of stuff he can take or leave, enjoy it and get inspired by it when it happens (like playing piano or listening to music, but not take action to make sure it happens) -- tonight I appreciated his yin to my yang. I would -- at least not in the long term -- be better matched by someone who had a similar temperament. I get to inhabit my temperament in part because he's not taking up/using/inhabiting the same kind of energy pattern.

So when I crawled into bed and snuggled up to him, I got present to what a good thing it is that he is who he is so I can be who I am.

Maybe one of these days we can talk and see that beauty instead of always kind of wishing the other were different.

Maybe we can manage having a second child together.