What I want to do with my life

What I want to do with my life is be happy and be satisfied and appreciate the wonder of the world around me and help others be happy and be satisfied and appreciate the wonder of the world around them because life is awe-inspiring and miraculous and we waste so much of it not-living and worrying and hurting ourselves and each other or focusing on all the things that are wrong which is sometimes ok because sometimes things can be improved and that’s a great thing but for the most part what I want to do with my life is say and write and do things that inspire others and help them which is why I get a thrill from writing especially when I publish something that resonates with others like even something simple like publishing a 10 minute free write on coquinas sparkling and then Zandy telling me she walked on the beach the other day and heard the clicking of shells as a wave receded and she might not have noticed it had she not read what I’d written about the coquinas and I thrilled when she told me that or when I posted a note internally at Automattic about an error message I’d come across in a live chat and I wanted to post it so it’d be searchable in case any other customers had that same issue and then Happiness Engineers thanked me when they found my note in their searches because they did have other customers with that same issue and my note saved them some time or on my blog when I publish something and a reader comments and says it resonated or they can relate or what I wrote has made them see something differently or think of it in a different way and I love that so much and it is one of the happiest most satisfying things in my life when it happens becuase I feel useful and like I’m helping but the weird thing is I don’t feel like I’m useful and helpful in the same capacity at home and it’s so strange because I feel like I’m failing or letting people down by not doing things for them which now that I’ve written that is ridiculous because you don’t help people by doing things for them you help by empowering them unless they really can’t do something for themselves and then you can do it for them and I realize this is vague for what I want to do with my life but it’s the deep meaningful thing I want to do and in terms of more superficial stuff I want to do I want to travel and I want to live on or by the ocean again because traveling and the salt water inspire me and show me the wonder and beauty of the world and the ocean especially humbles me before its power and greatness because it is vast and is both water and mineral earth and it is beautiful and blue and never the same but always the same and calm and wild and shallow and deep and provides us with the water we need to survive and tempers our climate and is the beginning of life on earth.

This was a writing exercise from Priscilla Long’s The Writer’s Portable mentor: “write for fifteen minutes a single unpunctuated sentence that begins, ‘What I want to do with my life is…’” I expected the exercise to be daunting but it ended up being really fun.