Life, the future and everything...

Talking to a friend recently, something came up that really bothered me.

We were talking about some issues she was having with her family. She still lives at home (glad I didn't when I was 21, but that's perhaps a whole other blog entry of it's own...), and is getting a lot of pressure from her parents.

"What are you going to do with yourself?"

"Why haven't you bought a house?"

"When are you going to find someone and start a family?"

Oh...my...god. She is 21. And she is supposed to have sorted out in her head what she wants to do for the rest of her life, have committed herself to the biggest debt she is ever likely to undertake, and found somebody and started spawning.

Wow.

It really got me thinking. Perhaps I'm a little unusual (some have hinted at this before...ok they have flat out said it). But here I am, sitting at the wrong side of 30, and I can't answer most of those questions.

I don't know exactly what I want to do, or where I want to go. If I may borrow some lyrics momentarily:

I used to have a little bit of a plan
Used to have a concept of where I stand
Now that concept's slipped right out of my hand
Now I don't really even know who I am
(Believe Me - Fort Minor)

Various things come and go, who can really know where they are going to be? And what is the point in committing yourself to something that will tie you down, if you don't know what you want?

I want to find someone to be with, share life's experiences with, be intimate with, start a family with one day. I used to need...I have addressed that and now I want, a much healthier situation.

However I also would like to travel, live overseas, experience a lot more of life and the world. It seems that this is a little in conflict with the first one. Just as I had set myself up for the travel and living overseas, I met someone. I put the travel/living overseas on hold, to explore the possibilities. It didn't work out, and now I'm back to square one.

I have been married. Divorced. I have moved from one side of the country to the other, and back again (in Australia, that's a fair old way). I have raced motorcycles, coached state league basketball. I look back and think I have done a lot of things, experienced a lot of things...and here I am, not exactly sure what I want to do.

How the hell are you supposed to be able to figure that out at 21 when you haven't even lived? And why should we have to? What's the rush?