Living free means you are motivated to take on life’s odd jobs, that you have lived your life the way you wanted with minimal regret.
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There is nothing wrong with obligation and responsibility. In fact, having people that depend on you and things that you are responsible for increases your level of interdependence and personal accountability a hundred fold. These two propositions are in fact healthy parts of life. However your motivation to take on any obligations or accept any new responsibilities will depend heavily on whether or not you feel you have lived your life to the fullest. If on some unconscious level you feel as though you have spent your entire life living for others, always doing the “right thing”, the thing that others expected of you, obligation and responsibility will feel like a tremendous burden.
Truth is, I’m turning 33 and I feel incomplete.
- I am currently going through a psychic midlife crisis where every day is groundhog’s day looking more or less the same every day.
- I am going through motions, breaking each day down to the bare bones of time and schedules.
- I am assessing every minute, second, millisecond wondering what I should be doing in any given moment so that I won’t wake up one morning with a dump truck full of regrets and a laundry list of things I wish I would have done when I was younger and had the chance.
My chronological age is incongruent with the age that I feel inside. Inside, I feel like an 18 year old just approaching the wonderment and excitement of my roaring twenties. There are still adventures that I wish to have and things that I want to do. I feel that in some respects it is too late for me because I spent my twenties frivolously. I wasted my twenties on grief, codependency, over responsibility and caring too much about what other people think of me. I squandered the money of my twenties on stupidity that seemed so important to me while it was happening but now given some time and distance, seems trivial and disdainfully insignificant.
Question is, do you ever really feel like you lived as much as you did when you did, or do you always believe that you had more living to do when you thought you merely existed your way through the life you wanted to live?
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Regretfully, I am getting older. My mother is getting older. I listen to “Landslide” by Stevie Nicks often. My identity will soon consist of being her caretaker. My life will revolve around doctors’ visits, feedings and worry. My mother will become the child I always questioned I wanted. Somehow I will be forced into an answer. The record will continue to spin until my own music stops and my mortality becomes an over played A-track talked about with as much enthusiasm as a childhood rock collection. I will have wished I lived more than I did. I will have wanted to do more when I had the chance. Question is, do you ever really feel like you lived as much as you did when you did, or do you always believe that you had more living to do when you thought you merely existed your way through the life you wanted to live? Asked another way, do you ever really feel as though you lived your life to the fullest extent possible or is your life always waiting to live itself in some new place, in some new moment in some new stretch of time?
I guess the key to living on time and opening yourself to the blessing and bounty of obligation and responsibility is to resolve all unfinished business and commit yourself to practicing unabashed honesty with yourself and translating your honesty into authentic action. You will be much more motivated to take on life’s many odd jobs if you feel that you are developmentally on track and have lived your life the way that you wanted with minimal regret and little desire to try to reclaim what you think you’ve lost along the way of conformity to life’s set time tables and the many expectations thrust upon you by your own conditioned mind and the incessant urgings of a society gone mad. It’s your life, live it. LIVE Responsible and most of all, LIVE FREE!
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Unedited Photo: Flickr/Rajarshi MITRA