is my favorite kind of wine. I think my taste in wine is devolving. I started off liking dry whites the best, then merlot, now super sweet bubbly stuff. Aren't you supposed to like dry and red more as your taste for wine develops? Oh well. I had some great CA gewurztraminer last week that Josh picked up at Wolfe's Market. It has just the right amount of fruitiness, and was actually not as sweet as a lot of gewurztraminers are. Try it! It's made by Gundlach Bundschu in Sonoma, CA. It goes very well with smoked salmon frittata and fruit salad. Mmmm...
I had decided I am having a quarter-life crisis until I realized that I'm not likely to live to be 104. Considering the short life-spans of my relatives, calling it a 1/3-life crisis seems more appropriate. I was on a business trip to Kentucky last week, and I think I had too much time on my hands with nothing to occupy my mind and not enough sleep. I thought about the fact that I'm turning 27 in a few months and kind of freaked out. I had thought I was above this or beyond it or whatever. I've read "Flux". I've taught myself to be realistic about what I can accomplish in my life. If I want to have a family and be the mom I want to be, I will probably not have a stellar career. I've spent the last 3 years of my life trying to get myself over the craving for recognition from the nameless Other as something special or smart or... just something. I've sought humility and the joy that comes with it. (Or have I?)
Then, out of nowhere came the nagging doubts. 30 is when you're supposed to be settled, to have your life and your circumstances picked out, yet here I am edging closer to the mark than I'd fully realized, having spent the last ten years of my life in preparation... for what? I got a masters so I could get into a good PhD program, but given a variety of circumstances I won't go into, that is not likely to happen for awhile. I'm learning to be a manager, but I don't really want the working hours that a job requiring these skills demands. I've spent the last 10 years preparing myself for something, and now I realize that it was less preparation and more sliding into the most convenient thing for me to do at the time. If only I'd decided at 15 that I wanted to be a nurse or a lawyer or a teacher. I would have been able to stick with it, and I would be done preparing for it by now and actually doing the work I was trained to do. What have now is a lot of preparation and no real career path to show for it.
As Josh gets within sight of finishing his PhD and we start considering what the next step in our lives will be, I have three worries: that I won't be challenged, fulfilled, or recognized in whatever I do next. I've spent the first third of my life shaping it, but I'm not sure what shape it's in. What defines who I am and how I am perceived? If we move, what impression will the people I meet have of me? For that matter, I don't really like where we live now. How will I ensure that the next place we live is better?
I was absolutely in knots with worry yesterday morning, and then we read this verse in Sunday School (a class that actually didn't have much to do with this topic. It was about anger):
"Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit'; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.' But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil." (James 4:13-16)
Ouch. Not only have I spent the last few years preparing for who knows what, I've spent them trying to quell the need I feel to shape my life into something particular, more specifically into something that commands recognition. And here I am, whining and fretting as if I hadn't learned a thing about humility and the fact that my plans matter so little, that God's plans are important (not to mention that they're the ones that will actually pan out.) What shape is my life in? Well, I know the shape it ought to be:
"Blessed is the man
Who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly,
Nor stands in the path of sinners,
Nor sits in the seat of the scornful;
But his delight is in the law of the Lord,
And in His law he meditates day and night.
He shall be like a tree
Planted by the rivers of water.
That brings forth its fruit in its season,
Whose leaf also shall not wither;
And whatever he does shall prosper." (Psalm 1:1-3)
If that could describe my life. Well, what are challenges, fulfillment, and recognition as we usually think of them next to that?