works of wanderlust

It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

Today that topic is…

Compared to this time last year are you more lost or found?

In accordance with the current theme and title of this blog, I will remind you that “not all who wander are lost” [J.R.R. Tolkien].

However, I did kickstart this blog back to life in the early months of this year and landed on a theme and a title that relayed a sense of abstractly lacking direction, for better or worse—I suppose.

Wandering can be a form of losing oneself in a familiar space, or it can be a directionless pursuit of the spontaneity of being purposefully adrift in a world of structure and plans and schedules and rules and… deep breath.

I choose a bit of both. And for the most part as I wake up each day looking at the lack of clarity and direction in that moment, well, I don’t see it as lost, so much as existentially adrift.

Yet, my life over the last few years has transitioned of one of structure, an over-packed meeting calendar and creeping project deadlines to something that is a little more digitally nomadic.  Though I may not necessarily wander in corpus, I have become something more of a wandering soul, seeking experience and inspiration around and about. In that sense I am far more lost from the structures of proper society than many of you may find comfortable for your own ways of being. It even makes my family a bit discombobulated sometimes as I embrace the day each and every morning with a lack of clarity of how those hours will be spent.

On the other hand there is a formality of purpose in how I spend those days, and one that didn’t exist even a year ago. I have a small business to bolster.  I make for myself some pretty strict creative goals around writing and music and coding and art that are driving me purposefully forward towards a kind of personal productivity of being that I had a vague sense of last year, and so perhaps I’ve taken a more rigidly “found purpose” approach to this past twelve month. In that sense, alternatively, I find myself more “found” each day with that sense of purpose and pride and personal accomplishment.

So how do I answer this particular question? Lost or found? Am I more found because of the strategic intent of my life or am I more lost because I’ve embraced a wandering affectation upon which to take the individual steps and moments of my days. I might suggest it balances out, but that is unsatisfying an answer as it is a cowardly reply. 

What matters the most? I think the perception of the day-to-day is what matters to me right now. I can continue to wander comfortably because most people see me, know me, relate to me on a broader timescale: weekly run friends, quarterly visits with acquaintances, sporadic family get togethers. To them the data points of the wandering life is smoothed to a gentle upward curve of momentum and achievement, perhaps. And like any and many of us, we can embrace the rolling toils of our lives on the moment by moment perception of it in the closer packed analysis of those moments, and that is what matters to us—for me that is a perception of wandering and distraction and engaging with the flicker of something new and shiny on a horizon I may never reach, running down a trail that veers off from the obvious path, or waking up and not knowing where I’ll find myself by lunchtime.

In other words, I’m a little bit more lost, but maybe that’s on purpose.