Imagining Possibilities

I'm in the plane heading back from a week at my mom's home in Miami. Nestled into my seat, the economy class size of it just right for my petite build, with plenty of white noise and a reading light casting a soft glow on my laptop, I feel cozy.

I spent the first hour of the flight analyzing the emotions that had welled up inside of me when I was getting ready to head to the airport this morning. I can spend hours buried in this analysis. Thinking deeply is a hobby of mine; this blog is a means of sharing some of those musings, which are oftentimes knotty and winding but nevertheless worthy of being shared.

Many of my most anguished musings involve problem-solving – not puzzles merely of the mind but emotional and moral struggles. Often, the center of the dilemma is how to best make myself of use to others; how do I use my "self" for all of its intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual worth, to serve the needs of others. I am sure that the world's philanthropists and charity workers face similar struggles, but the battle I speak of is the type involving day-to-day things, like being there for your friends and family when they need you.

The starting point of this musing is the cruel fact of life that you can't always have all of your beloveds in one place.

The untimely nature of my father's death has left my mom reeling, wanting to change time, history, the facts of life. She approaches the complexity of her situation with simple answers – and naturally so. She needs her kids and grandkids and family of all sorts to surround her with happiness, a forum to vent her frustrations, to share the simple pleasures of life, to fill her inner emptiness and the hollow halls of her stately Miami home with laughter, cheer, and presence. Knowing that my husband, daughter, and I are panaceas for her sadness, I am placed in a dilemma. The distance between she and us cannot easily be shortened. We have practical constraints holding us down in our respective geographical locations. Still, she implores strongly and frequently for us to move closer, to somehow change what cannot – at the time – be changed.

Most people would accept their inability to change what cannot be changed. I accept it, but I battle it. This is not the first time I have spent hours contemplating ways to get around that which practicality dictates. I like to use my creativity to finds loopholes in the ways things are, always thinking that life is as you make it to be; as the saying goes, if there's a will, there's a way.

This musing is not about the various possibilities I am imagining. It is about the fact that I am imagining possibilities.

Restlessness with the status quo forms the core of my personality. I am the Peanut Gallery because I have certain entrenched notions of "right" and "wrong" through which I view and comment upon the rest of the world. The commentary is harshest when it comes to myself. It involves delineating that which is "right." The next step is figuring out the role I can play in actualizing that "right." The final steps involve going to the ends of my logical, creative capacities to figure out a way of putting myself in a position where I can play that role.

From a moral perspective, it seems to me the only natural way to be. It's kind of like "have your cake and eat it too" but in a very self-sacrificial, emotionally painful sort of way. Where there are competing concerns, I want to somehow find conciliation, a way of serving polar opposites without becoming inherently contradictory. The result: life ends up feeling like a never-ending Twister game, where I am stretched and folded into pretzels, always feeling that my feet are slipping, seeking desperately to find stability and not crush everyone around me.

But is life really supposed to be this difficult? How does one negotiate between (1) the practical implications of wanting to do "right" and (2) what I feel is intrinsic morality, built in by God and encouraged by scriptural and social admonitions to promote good and forbid evil? Is there space in any of this for self-satisfaction, or is the quest to always work harder, seek to be better, and try to find solutions where there appear to be none?