Today I had a heart to heart with my HR over lunch. Within the discussion of life, work, happiness, she said something that resonated with me. “What is your Plan B”? If I chose a career and/or location change, what would that look like? I couldn’t answer that. As much as I’ve cried in vain over it throughout my life, as much as I feel I have so much more to offer a company and humanity as a whole, I’ve never actually painted that picture. What does that picture actually look like?
Monetarily in terms of pay, retirement, benefits, my career is the best! Self-fulfillment, gratification or a team environment on the other hand is a different story. Yet looking at the whole, my career is a small piece of this complex, beautiful, strange, exhausting, dark, chaotic dreams and nightmares that my soul finds itself swimming in. That shiny new person, place or thing we seek is only a bandage that rarely heals an infected wound.
Dreams are defined as a series of thoughts, aspirations, fantasies. Happiness is defined as a state (I interpret that as being 1 minute or an eternity). The question I’m then left with is, have I been striving for dreams or striving for happiness? The desire within humans is never fulfilled. Even the desire to not desire is a desire and we let ourselves suffer out of some self-justification that we deserve what we desire and if we don’t get it, we’ve failed in some way and cannot achieve a certain level of happiness without it.
Happiness is a state and somehow, somewhere along this journey, I’ve lost the map. It isn’t a career or person or obtaining some dream. It’s a place in our head. It’s quite fascinating how complex of a struggle it is to find that place within ourselves that’s always been there and was once ever so present.
I’m a huge Albert Camus fan. He wrote an essay titled The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus knew that rock was going to roll back down that hill and the only thing keeping him from killing himself was to find a version of happiness within. Some say the end justifies the means…but perhaps the means justify the end. Or, maybe in the end, neither matters one stinking bit.
