I am an experiment

Observing is usually an interesting way of studying something first hand, but what does it mean when I am observing myself?

Occasionally I look up and see where I live.  It is the last in a long string of places I have lived in my life and especially in the last fifteen years.  Looking back on those other places I realize that I was searching for myself. 

I grew up with expectations that reflected my mother's generation.  I married a man more grounded in my parent's generation.  I felt conflicted about my own generation and raised my children accordingly.  Then, suddenly, I was free to be exactly who I was.  There could be no more blaming on anyone or anything.  

I thought I knew who I was, but each place I lived ticked one spot off the list of who is me.

I discovered I could do almost anything, but my role as a mother and preschool teacher who liked to write and paint and be creative fit me better than any nine to five well paid job.  So I retired.  One box checked off the list.

I thought I wanted to live closer to nature and farther from people, but that turned out not to be true either.  I am a city girl who enjoys visiting nature.  Box two checked off.

I thought I wanted old classical furniture and houses, but that too turned out to be untrue, at least in the price range I could afford. So here I am in an apartment complex, living in a "luxury studio apartment" with bits and pieces of furniture I liked too much to get rid of.  I am always surprised how much this seems to really be me.

Little by little, by the process of doing and undoing, I am discovering what truly suits me and sometimes I feel like a hamster under glass being observed by myself.  It is certainly not conventional by old world standards.  And by old world I mean the world I grew up in and based my values on for at least fifty years.

But it is feeling more right with every week that passes. 

It only requires that I experience and evaluate and honestly look at my life without the old censors and that is harder to do than I imagined, because censors are autonomic pieces of me carefully pressed into my psyche and sanded smooth over long years of use.  I barely notice they are here and yet, they are what make me uncomfortable in my own skin much of the time.

Learning what to let go of and what to embrace, what to create anew and what to cherish from the past is a slow painstaking process.

I am both the scientist and the experiment. The results are unknown, but the way is too rich and full of flavor to give it up.