Left Foot on Danger

My iPod decided to shuffle directly from Laibach to Snatam Kaur this morning, which suddenly gave me one of those common-sense epiphanies... you know, things which are obvious, but which if you actually stop to think about seem kind of profound.

It really is amazing the different planets people live on. There are people who live their new-age or Buddhist or mellow lives, striving for and dwelling in peace and gentleness every day, drinking their chamomile tea and smelling flowers and smiling a lot. All the time. There are people who live their anger, stomping about in their combat boots and rivets and chains and drinking their Jager. Every day.

I think, personally, it's a far more interesting life to have one foot on each end of the spectrum. In fact, I think my life is basically laid out on a Twister board. I've got fingers in so many pies and facets in so many directions... one day I will meditate to Tibetan singing bowls for 3 hours and be very quiet. One day I will laugh and shimmy and be raucous. One day I will rage. Call it moodiness if you like, I call it diversity. And yeah, like a complicated game of Twister, when you've got appendages planted all over the board, it feels off-balance sometimes. But I think I wouldn't trade this for any kind of consistently immersed daily routine.

The only problem is that we only get one go-around in this lifetime, most of us. Decisions have to be made. I panicked when I was about 5 and asked my mom when I had to make a solid decision about what I wanted to be when I grew up. She laughed and said I didn't have to worry about it until at LEAST junior high when I started deciding which schools, programs, and classes I wanted to be in.

By age 19, far past that time, I was still all over the place. There were days when I forsaw myself married to a French-speaking diplomat, playing politics and the role of the good first lady and walking the grounds of some European estate with gardens. There were days when I saw myself living in a tree house with some crazy architect, fully hippie-fied. Days when I saw myself striding confidently down some metropolis avenue with a latte in one hand and that day's court briefing in the other. Or perhaps parked in some uber-modern Bay area anti-cubicle, riding my Segway from one end of the compound to the other as I helped revolutionize the world online.

I guess I've settled, in that degree. I am not going to be Mademoiselle Wendy des Jardins. Nor "Wendy, the funny lady who carves windchimes on the house up the mountain". Nor Wendy, esq. Nor Wendy, CEO of eTalk Velocicompany.

But this is ok. At the end of high school--which I'm not going to lie, was a brutal time for me (and not in the metal sense of the word)-- I was lying an a hospital bed and my sister brought me a mixtape. I haven't listened to it since because it makes me cry. It's got the song from "The Fox and the Hound" on it: "When you're the best of friends." It's got "Winter" by Tori Amos on it:" When you gonna love you as much as I do." But most profoundly for me was one of Tori's lesser known songs called "Girl".
From in the shadow
She calls
And in the shadow
She finds a way
And in the shadow
She crawls
Clutching her faded photograph
My image under her thumb
Yes with a message for my heart
She's been everybody else's girl
Maybe one day she'll be her own
Everybody else's girl
Maybe one day she'll be her own

It was true. I had been everybody else's girl for far too long. And now, I may be teetering on a Twister board, but by god, I'm my own.