"You are testing my patience."
I had just shared an article with my husband on "Secret Dining," a hip new trend making its way from Chicago to New York. Essentially these underground "restaurants" offer gourmet dinners at invitation-only parties in exchange for "donations." Sometimes dinners are combined with salon-type discussions, art showings, or other events. Cool, exclusive, hip. All the fun of running an upscale restaurant without all the health department hassles.
I am a woman with a many interests. In one recent lunch conversation a friend and I managed to touch on a mind-boggling array of topics including martial arts, knitting and crocheting, gourmet cooking, Tarot cards, dream interpretation, massage/bodywork, marriage, writing, photography, tea ceremonies, pottery, journaling, and what she plans on doing when she becomes an empty nester a year from now. This was before I read the Secret Dining article, which now had me thinking about our monthly parties and the musicians I would love to have play for us and how a playwright friend may want to use our home as a set for a play. A little Midsummer Night's Dream in our woods, perhaps?
My husband knows me very well and followed my river of unspoken thoughts to its logical conclusion while I casually ate my dinner and waited for him to finish reading. Once he reached the end, he calmly placed the paper on the table, looked me in the eye and said "No, you cannot open a restaurant in our home." All attempts to deny that I had been seriously entertaining the thought were met with patient silence and the knowing look that told me I was fooling no one.
Then he asked the Question of Death: "When are you going to do what you are really supposed to be doing and write your book?"
"Whaaaa, but I don't know what the book is."
"Yes you do. You know the one after that, too. You think you have to know the book completely before you write it but it doesn't work that way. Everything that you are learning and everything that you know doesn't mean anything to anyone unless you are going to do something with it."
To make matters worse, he then listed all the things I had been dabbling in, both for fun and profit, since leaving my prior career. With my newly awakened entrepreneurialism added to all my prior avocational interests, my list of pursuits had grown to absolutely ridiculous proportions. After a long history of job burnout and a passionate desire to create an ideal life, I had somehow stumbled into a love affair with one distraction after another.
Article comments
1 - alessandro nicolo
Great thoughts. Couldn't agree more. I decided to become who I am at 33. It's easy to regret not seeing it earlier - especially with instability at its height.
2 - Laura Young
Well, if it's any consolation, Alessandro, you may be ahead of the curve. I know many people who are just asking themselves the question of "So who am I really?" in a serious way when they are in their 40s and 50s. We joke a lot about people needing to find themselves, but it's true, it's very hard to get a clear view of ourselves. And we get such varied reflections back from our relationships across our different roles, it can be like living in a house of mirrors.