A little known fact about me.  I once helped liberate fourteen animals from a labratory that was affiliated with a major drugstore chain.  It was all very covert and nondestructive.  We saved fourteen animals and gave them good homes.  I hope I don’t go to jail for admitting this online.  It was many, many years ago and I was very young - certainly wasn’t the master mind of the operation.  But I went.

My point in divulging any of this to you is because my identity (if you haven’t noticed from previous blogs) is becoming somewhat illusive to me these days.  I don’t care to be a fist raising activist or someone who is righteously ethical - though that was an outfit I wore for many years.  But, where is the line?  How do we creep into being a reasonable adult with a balanced perspective about their lifestyle without entirely becoming a sell out?  My fear is that I am not becoming “balanced” but lazy. 

I have started taking long walks in the morning.  530am is my target rising time - though it is hard to get out of bed before 6am.  During these long walks alone, I have been thinking.  Thinking about my past.  Thinking about my present.  Obsessively thinking about my future and what kind of person I am turning into.  I have also started to think about who I am not any longer.  Everyone around me seems so pleased to know that I have “loosened up” - I eat fish, I wear leather, I had turkey for Thanksgiving, I drive something very similar to a small SUV (alright, it is a small SUV..), I let my kids watch TV now (only PBS but, still…).  I am far from a perfectionist - seriously.  I never adhered to a “no-TV-vegetarian-econocar-driving” lifestyle because I was a perfectionist about my lifestyle.  Admittedly, I did it out of guilt.  I couldn’t bear having any responsibility for destruction of any kind and, when I had kids, I didn’t want them to be comfortable living an overindulged, destructive lifestyle either.  So, what gives?  What switch got flipped in me?  Am I being lazy or just figuring out how to work within the constraints of the society around me? 

I guess, mostly, I just want to know why I can’t turn it off.  I see all these people, every day, living so simply and easily.  They glide through their day,without even an inkling of a thought for their actions and behaviour.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be like that, I just want to find a middle ground.  Somewhere, there has got to be a middle ground.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 30th, 2006 at 10:57 am and is filed under Lifestyles, Daily Living, Mental Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.