NOT ME, NOT IT

It begins with your not feeling comfortable in your own skin.  Then your clothes don't fit right you feel.  Then you don't feel comfortable with everyone around you.

You go to school and are bored with the subjects.  You ask, "What does this have to do with me?"  The subjects miss the point you feel, even though you don't know what that point is exactly. 

You finish school and go out and get a job, and then the work you've been hired to do feels irrelevant.  Again and again you say to yourself, "This is not me.  This is not it."  The feeling continues year after year, decade after decade.

Along the way, you get married and raise a family, but it might as well be someone else doing it.

Joseph Campbell would say, "You simply haven't found your 'bliss' yet.  You haven't found what you are passionate about.  What do you like to do above all else, no matter how incidental it might seem?"  You've thought about this, but, "It's not about what I really like to do, or even what I really like to think about."  "Well, keep looking," Campbell would say.

But then you reach a certain age when it's time to take stock of it all.  You note that you've held jobs galore, been everywhere, done everything, been successful in societal terms, but alas every bit of it still feels hollow to you.  You see now that you will die just as "unrealized" as when you started your life.

Except one morning, during your walk through the neighborhood, something happens.  With everything off the board now, your having lived your life, your having been everywhere, done everything, what should arise but your bliss.

That vague feeling deep down in you that you always paid no attention too, because it was precisely that, vague, you find has burst forth all of a sudden like a fireworks display.  It had been awaiting just this condition in you, apparently.  It was there all your life, but its time was not yet.  Now it was.  You awaken.  "Eureka!  Bingo!" you shout.  "Me, at last.  It, at last."