When given the choice between certainty and the possibility of fulfilling a dream or a passion, I will nearly always gravitate towards certainty. Why? I’ve never been one to risk falling flat on my ass if my dreams fail. Has this approach ever actually worked? Nope. So if certainty isn’t all that certain, what is the real risk of trying to attain a goal that just might make me happy in the long run?
So, I’m not saying that I’ve never taken a risk, but let’s just say my approach towards said passions is usually half-assed as well. When I lost my job because I asked if the company I worked for was being bought out by another company back in nineteen-ninety-nine, I figured what the hell, I’d try my hand at being a web designer. My naivety of the world of web designing, and the fact that I never had any formal training, and that HTML was almost completely foreign to me (though, admittedly, I do know some source codes) should have been a huge warning sign that this wasn’t going to work. Alas, I tried anyway. I failed to even get started and ended up working at The-Store-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named for the next nine years. Again, choosing certainty over self-fulfillment.
The older I get, the less tolerance I have for simply allowing myself to fall into familiar patterns. However, I must admit that having a job in this economy is worth far more to me at this moment than pursuing a dream or two. Perhaps a balance is required where I can find the time to do both. My husband asked me the other day why I never write anymore, and I had to be honest, it’s this blog. My original goal was to write every day for a year to prove to myself that I could do it first, but also to try and stimulate my creative side and work on a novel or children’s book or something, anything. However, while he believes this blog has been a hindrance to that, I’m thinking that I have been the actual roadblock. I mean, I only spend about fifteen to twenty minutes a day writing a blog entry, usually first thing in the morning while drinking my coffee, which, even after work, leaves me with plenty of time to work on other projects.
Lately I’ve been taking a hard look at how I spend my time and if it is worth it to be a mindless zombie or to force myself to work on doing something creative every day. I think that if I really wanted to, I could do this. After all, even though some of the blogs I’ve written are, well, complete crap, I still wrote them for a small amount of self-fulfillment to prove that I could make a goal and stick to it. So perhaps instead of taking a risk, or thinking that I’d be risking my job at the sake of creativity, I need to simply make the time to do something about what little sanity I have left and use some of my God-given talents before they whither away.
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