Will power

Just a few musings today is all I can really muster; I have no big heart-stopping events to tell, no pictures of my escapades, or even funny videos to show. I've just been skipping around the internet, from Cracked.com to YouTube to random parenting sites I found linked from my cousin's wife's Facebook page. (Hi, Diana!)

And this mishmash of input, together with my daily life here, has prompted some musings. They're simple, stupid even, but here goes nothing.

One of the big markers and privileges of becoming an adult is that you gain the ability and prerogative to make your own choices. Which is the great and glorious culmination of a childhood-long journey towards independence. You don't want to do something? Fine--don't. You want to do something else instead? Go for it.

The uncomfortable part of this arrangement comes when you don't want to do something, know that you should do it anyway, and have nothing to force you to do it anyway other than your own will power. By crossing this gap, you go from being an adult to being a responsible adult.

To be honest, I'm struggling with making the choice to be a responsible adult these days. For starters, I missed the intermediate stage most of my peers got in college. My college experience was strictly structured, not so much by an outside power but by my intrinsic need to achieve; to do that, I knew, I had to do X, Y, and Z. So I did. My college years, which so many people treat as the one time in your life when you can be stupid and recover from afterwards, were for me one heavily-scheduled day after the next, as I checked everything off my list like a responsible adult, so that I could achieve in life.

And it worked. I did well in school, was able to pay my bills, and I applied for and got a Fulbright grant.

Which takes us to now. I know what I want to achieve going forward: I want to get a fulfilling job in the writing/editing world and, hopefully as a result of said job, be able to pay off my remaining student loans. But what about now? Now I'm working as a teacher, which is fantastic, and I love it, but it's hard to see how time put into this pursuit can get me a job as an editor. Beyond that, I'm in a foreign city and foreign country where I will stay for one year, with a small group of people with whom I can communicate. Not exactly the sort of situation in which you can put down real roots.

My life is in flux: while I'm here, the only thing that does matter, or rather can matter, is the here and now. I can't do much of anything now to impact my future; what is, is, and that's just about all there is to it. I know this is a very good thing for me, a chance for me to learn to live here and now rather than in the future as I have done for, if I'm honest, the past eight years. But still, it makes it incredibly difficult to make the jump from being a self-indulgent adult living on and for momentary impulses to being a responsible adult, doing things because you should. As it turns out, my will-power is enormously achievement-based; when there is no attainable achievement to be gained, I have a hard time motivating myself to do much that I don't want to do.

So that's what I'm working on: filling the gap between adulthood and responsible adulthood with a mortar of self-discipline, shifting my motivation from mere achievement to principle, something infinitely less changeable. You have to start with something. And, though it has yet to motivate me into a steady workout schedule, it has at least locked me into a daily recounting of my thoughts, whether I feel like it or not--and whether they're worth reading, or just a few simple, stupid musings.