Limitations

How do you recognize your limitations and when you should give something up?

I have been thinking about this a lot. I know I am over weight right now and I keep getting small physical reminders of that fact in body and actions that reinforce the fact that I am about to be 30 years old and I weigh over 200 pounds. Frankly I do not care about the age but for 30 I have done very little of the traveling I had planned. Yes, I have traveled but nowhere near what I planned. Plans have been shattered left and right for most of my life in fact.

I was reading a post on The Happiness Project that corresponded with this.

First, it makes me sad to realize my limitations. The world offers so much!–and I am too small to appreciate it. The joke in law school was: “The curse of Yale Law School is to try to die with your options open.” Which means — at some point, you have to pursue one option, which means foreclosing other options, and to try to avoid that is crazy. Similarly, to be Gretchen means to let go of all the things that I am not — to acknowledge what I don’t encompass. But it also makes me sad because, in many ways, I wish I were different. One of my Secrets of Adulthood is “You can choose what you do, but you can’t choose what you like to do.” I have a lot of notions about what I wish I liked to do, of the subjects and occupations that I wish interested me. But it doesn’t matter what I wish I were like. I am Gretchen.

I want to be Amelia and stop having to live up to everyone else’s notions of what I “should” be doing.

Do I want to be thinner? Yes. Do I want to be healthier? Yes.

That is why I started exercising.

But for where I planned to be when I was 30, none of that has happened. I did graduate with my Bachelors degree but not in the area I planned. I planned to work in Pharmacy but not in computers, now I do both.  I planned to have moved out of the state by now. But I do have my own home and have fixed it up the way I want it.

I have been planning a massive two-week trip to Europe for the last 6 months only to have my travel partner back out. Now I am trying to decide if I want to go by myself. Two weeks alone in a crowd in a foreign country…still not sure. I am close to just forcing myself to go for the hell of it, even if I am miserable. Not sure. I am giving myself till the end of July to decide.

http://www.happiness-project.com/happiness_project/2008/10/paradoxes-of-ha.html

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