Life on pause

I figured I’d end the year on a question that someone asked me recently that I wasn’t able to properly answer. It’s an appropriate question for the last night of the year: Am I happy?

That’s a really difficult question for me to answer and there aren’t too many questions that I can’t figure out. My entire income is based on people posing really difficult questions to me and my coming up with quick and insightful answers. But trying to say if I’m happy or sad is not a binary answer, which is really difficult for this 21st century digital boy to process.

I’ll start where I always start, facing the fact that I am as blessed as any one person could ever hope to be. I’ve got a great job, a wonderful family and a relatively worry free life. I don’t worry about my next meal or paying the rent or whether I am going to be mauled by a large bear when I go to pick up my mail. I lead an insanely cushy life where buying the complete series of Voltron DVDs seems like a perfectly wise investment. As a result I don’t know if I should have anything to complain about.

But as anyone who has read this blog will have undoubtedly noticed by now I complain about pretty much everything. Some of that is for show, some of what I write here is written as EC as opposed to Chris, but a lot of it is real. And I think it is because I seem to have lost the plot to my own life story. I’m not sure what any of this means anymore. I have a lot of stuff but little meaning. As another friend of mine once asked me when I talked about my job “But is it getting you any closer to a state of grace?” Forget my job leading me to a higher purpose, I don’t know of any aspect of my life that is.

That’s what really has been bothering me the most. I don’t think it is existential angst or that given my lifestyle I’m probably in my mid-life crisis; it’s that I just don’t feel the same possibility of impacting the world that I had just a few years ago. I don’t want to give up my belief that I can change the world. I’m not very adept at simply being a cog in a machine.

I know that I’m missing a few vital pieces to my life. They’re pretty damn obvious and sadly, do not include the Lego Millennium Falcon. At least I know where to get one of those. As with everything else in my life, the challenge is to get me to go out and try knowing that I might fail. Having spent my entire life putting myself in positions where it would be impossible for me to fail that is a very frightening proposition.

So what’s the answer to Am I Happy? Right now I’m content. I’m worry free. That’s not the right way to live. I’ll be changing that next year.

Happy New Year everyone. Go Illini. New Year’s Resolutions and my year end review of concerts and books will be coming in the next few weeks. I’ll end the year on an upbeat note…