Dissatisfaction

I often find that my moments of greatest clarity and understanding often occur when I wake up early to go to the bathroom and am still half asleep.

This morning I realized that my true dissatisfaction lies in the fact that I'm doing jobs but am not the master of any of them and that I don't have any goals or long-term project in my life. It's not my show at the hotel. I'm not the primary photographer which would give me a whole different level of confidence and feeling of self-worth. For my English classes, I don't have a planned out curriculum. I work out of several chapters of photocopied books that P. has chosen without even seeing the full book and understanding the bigger picture. There's no sense of accomplishment of making my way through a book or curriculum. The magazine translation is more project-oriented, but it's thrown at me so last minute without me getting a full picture of how many articles and a time frame. It's just "work as fast as you can and try to get it all done". For this issue I've had the articles since Tuesday and have barely started translating.

I saw the movie Capote last week and one thing that really struck me was how focused he was on researching and writing his book and how he knew from the beginning that it was important and would be big. Granted it was a movie and I'm sure some of it was portrayed for dramatic effect. But I felt envious of someone who could be so confident about what they were doing. I feel like I just sort of stumble through life and it all works out (and it even seems to work out pretty well) but it's never so clear. Maybe because I want to see things in black and white and there's really a lot of gray. Maybe it's my perfectionist nature where I want to have a clear goal and have every step be laid out with nothing extraneous to lead me astray.

As I write this, I realize that sort of rigidity is not what I really want. And once again, I really need to enjoy the journey even more than the destination. I don't know how to get rid of this impatience to want things done now. But isn't life a constant learning process? I mean if I spoke perfect Spanish like a native speaker, would I be happy then? No, I'd take it for granted and be bummed out that my Mandarin was so basic. And if I was a highly accomplished wedding photographer who knew every lighting techniques, would I be happy then? No, I'd probably feel bad that I hadn't published a book on an interesting photojournalistic project.

I just need to chill the f*@& out and enjoy the fact that I have a day off and the sun is shining and it's warm.