This strikes a chord. The sadness I sometimes feel might be related to the loss of mountains. I’ve been goal-oriented all my life, but my focus was always getting over and past the mountain range as quickly as possible to what I perceived to be the smooth sailing of the flat lands. I’ve posted in other threads that I started planning for retirement from the first day of my first job out of college, a 38-year countdown to walking away from the tether of a job, any job. I never wanted to work. Or have kids. Or travel. So now I’m retired, our only (surprise and late-born) child is successfully launched, and DH and I are healthy in body, relationship, and bank account, but the general zest for life is gone, and I have no idea where to find it here in the surprisingly meaningless flat land. Life has become, well, flat, despite having arrived precisely where I’d planned.
As to meaningless… That’s another can of worms. My faith informs where my hope and purpose lie, so now I feel guilty as well as depressed that my belief system is is perhaps not as strong and fed as I thought it was. I’ll leave it at that so we don’t wander into forbidden territory, but sometimes I feel I’ve lost a bit of my blessed assurance, too.
On the surface, nothing is wrong with/in my life, so I go on with hobbies and parties and marriage and family and community, but something is just “off,” and it’s definitely related to the inexorable march of time (that’s also stomping on the face I see in the mirror). If there are no mountains left to climb, then why go on? This can’t be all there is down here, so I’m trying to figure out how I should be using and finding meaning in the time I have left. I’ve always been intrigued by the question, “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” I’ve been afraid to consider the answer because I’m sure it will reveal years of wasted time, but I think this is where I need to go if I’m to leave this world with no regrets.
Or perhaps I should just spend more time on the Internet reading how everyone else is dealing with this phase of life. Just a little bit longer…