Seizing

I'm definitely at an interesting point in my life right now. The future is looming large in the form of my wedding and house-hunting. Also, my side-project, building websites, earned me more in January than it did for the entire year last year. If I keep up even a quarter of the work-load I've had so far this year, it's going to mean big changes in my life. More income, to be sure, but less free time too.

Lately I have been spending a lot of time thinking about life and what makes it good or bad on an incidental level. It is amazing how long it takes just to figure out what should get a priority slot in the daily grind. It takes even longer to learn how to keep giving that thing a priority slot when the thing seems non-essential, and life gets busy (which it always, always, always does).

At the ripe old age of 27, I know that happiness in life is not so great a mystery as we all like to say it is. There have always been three basic elements to my lifestyle during the periods of greatest sunshine in my life. I am most happy when I:

• Spend time on worthwhile pursuits.
• Eat and sleep well.
• Stay active.

For me, that sums it up. Oh, well, actually, with one other pretty big thing thrown in:

• Keep a clean living space.

Of course, all these things are complex and ever-changing. In college 'eat' meant put food in my tummy. Now it means eat fresh foods mainly consisting of whole grains, local produce and small amounts of good meat. Also, a clean dorm room is a far cry from a clean house.

Still, the list seems so simple when broken down this way and yet it is so hard somehow to stay in a consistent pattern of living to acheive my full level of potential happiness. I get stuck in these weird habit-spirals, where I know that my unhappiness level is directly related to how much time I spent on my computer vs. how much time I spend with my horse. Yet, when I'm pushed into my 'computer' mode (almost always by a rush of web-work) I get trapped there, and I end spending more time on the computer than I really need to because I can't get out of my rut. Then I feel stressed and rushed in all my other pursuits, so I don't clean the house as thoroughly and start skipping meals or eating quick things that aren't as healthy. I don't have time for the barn day after day and then the part of me that needs a horse to be happy starts gnawing away at the rest of me.

This goes on for a few weeks and then one day I walk into the living room and notice the piles of lint in the corners and the heap of mail on the edge of the couch and I freak out, run around cleaning like a mad-woman for three hours and then sit down, look at my life and ask myself, 'what happened?'

Well, I lost track of something simple.

Carpe Diem is so easy to say, but so hard to do. And so much about life is cyclical anyway, perhaps the ups and down are inevitable on some level. I know I am lucky in that my downs aren't really all that down and also Brian steps up to the plate and shops and cooks a lot when I'm slowly expiring under a heap of rush-jobs. Still, I'm going to try to keep work in better perspective for the rest of the year and keep in mind that money isn't worth having if you're too unhappy to enjoy the things it can bring you.