It's time to take over the world

I have discovered the meaning to life.

Silly that it's taken me this long, really. It's been flitting about in front of me for years. But this morning, in the shower, there it was. Clear as a bell.

I do some of my best thinking in the shower and, of late, I've had a lot to think about.

Of course, you may put it down to my mid-life crisis. I prefer to think of mid-life as providing me the wherewithall and opportunity to get a few things figured out.

Mid-life is a funny time. (As in funny: ha-ha and funny: weird.) A balancing act. Half your life already on the scale, weighted by the choices made in the past, good bad and indifferent; half your life ahead wide open to possibilities that will balance the scale.

That's where I am. Mid-life. Half gone; half still to come.

Some days that can be depressing, but on better days I recognize how long it took me to get here and see that there is much still to come and I feel like an explorer charting a new course.

Mid-life is one of those milestones like adolescence or becoming an adult. For women, like me, it's also a time of raging hormones and a sort of insanity. (God, remember adolescence!)

The combination of these things drives many of us who have reached this point in life to seek meaning for our existance, justification for our choices, and change. For me, this desire for change is rooted in a life spent making disasterous choices and working far too hard at things that, in the long run, don't mean a damn thing. Perhaps this journey of discovery is nothing more than the selfish pursuit of an admirable epitaph, one's mortality becoming suddenly real. The light now visible at the end of the tunnel.

But I choose to see the desire for change differently.

I used to read a book to my kids. It was called Miss Rumphius. The moral of the story was that we all had a job to make the world a more beautiful place.

And that's it.

The meaning of life.

After, superficially, pondering the tenets of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism and Islam; after looking over racks of self-help books in the local bookstore; after witnessing the horror that is the evening news; after focussing on how to improve myself and what's wrong with me; and after living through and living alongside depression, I've come to the conclusion that the only thing wrong with me is my inability to see outside of myself. To get over myself, so to speak.

And it's not just me.

We spend a ton of cash and a lot of time seeking meaning -- pursuing happiness.

We explore different faiths, we turn to angels, consult psychics, clear our chakhras, watch Dr. Phil, spend millions of dollars on discovering the eight ways for this or the 10 steps for that. For what purpose?

To feel happy. To feel like we matter.

Upfront, I should say that I am not a religious person. That is to say I belong to no religious order. I have never been baptised and tend to a good deal of cynacism about organized faith. But, like the analyst I tend to be, I am curious about what religions teach. It seems to me that religions speak, in one way or another, about charity, about being good to others, about kindness. Of course, there is other stuff, but these are the words that speak most clearly to me.

And I take some of the blame for humanity getting off track with these lovely tenets. It was my generation, afterall, that decided that being a good person meant being good to oneself.

It's time to change all that.

And so, I have decided that changing the world, one idea at a time, is something I can accomplish in my lifetime. Totally achieveable.

So that's what I'm setting out to do. Choose one thing and make a difference. Just one thing is all it takes.

I hope you're going to come along for the ride. Maybe even choose your own one thing to change the world.

Till next time,
C