What to do...

I'm getting fat and lazy. It appears to be a side-effect of a life going too well.

I love, like and respect my family. My wife of fifteen years still makes romance an adventure and a mystery. If I did not love her I would genuinely and sincerely like her. I've loved my children as babies, toddlers and kids. Now, as a young man and a young woman I am proud and impressed with their budding strength, intelligence and courage. They will be fantastic adults.
The cluttered house is beautiful and full of books, looking south over a sweep of gorge and valley and mountain. The land requires work and improves every time I choose to sweat.

Work is good, though often boring. I don't get challenged by inmates anymore; bad things tend to stop when I show up... but I still get to talk to schizophrenics and stabilize suicidals and mediate disputes and occassionally use the voice that makes violent grown men be quiet.

I don't spend enough time with my friends, but they are special: intelligent, caring, devoted, talented. Adventurers, protectors, hunters, healers and shamans.

Martial arts is where I feel the dissatisfaction most. When I started I thought it would be an infinite learning curve and it could be... except that I decided to focus on practicality and test it in reality. Learning moves to know them no longer appeals. Playfighting is fun but not important. It is rare to learn something new that works. Most instructors, when they talk about violence, are trying to describe an animal they have never seen.

I've never needed much. Anything beyond a daily meal and a relatively warm place to sleep was an extra. My life is all extras now- love, prosperity and even some acclaim.

So when life is going this well, when you have acheived more than you thought you could...how do you keep living? Why?

So what now? Make up some imaginary goal just to keep going? Wrap my life around obligation and duty? (Ooops. Doing that now). Fade away? Rest for a year or two and see what looks interesting?

This is my mid-life crisis, I suppose. When everyone else is looking back from 40 saying how little they've achieved I'm the one saying, "I did all that? Christ, I need a break!"