The basic question

Yesterday was the first anniversary of this blog of mine. As I find I haven’t made much progress during the year I need to pose this question to myself in black and white, “What’s stopping you?”

Absolutely nothing! Absolutely everything that’s stopping me is inside my own head and I should be the best expert to handle that.

When I was young, it was incredibly easy to make decisions. In fact, it feels like you hardly ever had to make any but you just let yourself glide with the flow of life: 12 years at school, a few years of studies, getting married with your (first) boyfriend, taking a mortgage, starting a family, accepting whichever job you could find...  To me the 1970s and 1980s were a kind of a continuum of the simplicity of my childhood when practically everything that happened in your life was self-evident.

Now everything seems so much more complicated. There are not only masses of different kinds of options that weren’t there in my youth but thanks to all the means of modern media we are much more aware of them all. No wonder it is so hard for some to settle down and decide which one of the myriad of paths to follow to reach their dream when there are so many competing dreams you could pursue.

I feel I have been smitten by this complexity. But this time I couldn’t find any excuse even if I tried. My children have been grown-ups for years, there are no grandchildren yet and there is no longer any mortgage nor job to tie me down to the nine-to-five cage. I’m completely free to do as I please.

Nothing’s stopping me. This time next year I had better know what to do with the rest of my life and be headed that way full speed.