Doing what you want

I just got the travel guide today for England by a guy named Rick Steves. It’s not as pretty as the Lonely Planet guide, but I felt like it was the better one to get. I went to Barnes and Noble the other day to compare the two and I just liked this one by Rick Steves better. It’s also up to date for 2012, whereas the one from Lonely Planet was written last year.

Oh god next year is not going to go by fast enough!

I was thinking about my sister this morning, as triggered by a lovely note I received on a previous entry. It got me thinking about the choices I’ve made in life as compared to my sister, or to other people who ‘envy my freedom’, as they say.

I do see where I am in life right now as a kind of freedom, but not in the sense that I don’t have any cares, or that I shirk responsibilities in order to have a good time. I have a borning nine to five job, and I’m moving back in with family in order to reach long term goals. These two things are less than ideal to me, but I put up with them because it means I’ll be able to do other things later on. I have no money right now. I can do very little presently because I simply do not have the means. I wouldn’t necessarily call that real freedom, but I do know that it’s far less restricted than the lives other people lead.

And when I think about what I’m doing with myself right now, I almost always end up comparing it to how my life would be if Scott and I had ended up staying together, and I am so thankful that we decided to break up despite the pain it put me through. I am so much happier than I know I would be if we had tried to work it out and I had moved to Davis. And that is a freedom is the best possible sense. Yeah, I don’t currently spend time traveling the world like I want to, but I’ve made very serious changes in my life that will make it happen by this time next year. Changes that could never have been possible if Scott and I were still together.

I don’t have a glamorous life, but if you were to talk to my sister, she would say the complete opposite. My life consists of a lot of being tired, hating my job, getting frustrated that plans don’t move fast enough, and somehow trying to ease all that stress with periodic stints of merrymaking with friends in the afternoons and weekends, or in the making of more plans mixed with a whole lot of writing and reading.

And I wonder, back when she was nineteen, what she was thinking, or how her mind was working, when she thought it was a good idea to get pregnant and married at that age. I wonder how she figured she was in a good position, so young, to start a family and obtain two mortgages. I would have been a complete mess had our situations been switched. I can’t imagine the idea of having children at that age. I could barely take care of myself.

Granted though, she’s now got three kids and is going through the very first stages of divorce. Her short marriage has not been a relatively happy one and her husband is taking it in a very immature fashion. I wonder if she envies where I am because she regrets the choices she’s made? I hope, deep down, that that is not true. She has three beautiful children that I certainly love to death, and she’s been very blessed in her life. And she is doing something that she has always loved to do. She went to school specifically to be a horse trainer and she’s very good at it. The horses she’s trained are some of the best behaved I’ve ever met and she is currently training for friends and family. I believe her long term dream is to make that part of her career, and I truly think she could be successful at it. She just has to work on focusing on the here and now, getting past the divorce, and starting from scratch again.

My mother is the same way. She is also currently going through a divorce that my father is handling like a teenage boy. She’s worse off than my sister because she’s been in her unhappy situation for almost thirty years and I think her biggest problem is grappling with the idea that her life is not going to be the same at all after it’s finished. She’d clinging to these long winded ideas of going into property management, buying apartment complexes, splitting the property she’s on right now into two lots. And it’s just not feesable. But she can’t see, or maybe can’t stomach the idea that she needs to start putting herself in a position where she can start from scratch.

But these problems are easy for me to see and reason out because they aren’t actually happening to me. That’s what I tell myself anyway. I also don’t have sentimental separation issues like my mom does. She never gets rid of anything, whereas if I thought I might need to get the hell out at short notice, I’d be perfectly okay with leaving most of my stuff behind or throwing it away. It’s the only way you can really start anew. My mom cannot do that, even though she really needs to, and she won’t listen to anyone when they tell her so.

This is a really rambling entry. It’s busy at work and it’s taken me four hours to write this. I give up. Have a great weekend!