It’s September.

I keep getting older, but I swear, time also goes by much faster!  That’s a thing, right?  Time speeds up as we age?  I think it is.

We spent the last week of August in Hilton Head.  We were scheduled to spend the first week of September, but Dorian interfered and HHI was mandatorily evacuated. So, that was a fun, unscheduled 13 hour drive (haha!).

On Wednesday August 28, with my Dad and my brother and my husband and my aunt and uncle (my mother’s siblings) and Jojo, we scattered some of my mother’s ashes.  It was a beautiful evening, a perfect South Carolina sunset.  We all felt the weight of the situation as we walked slowly toward the water.  We didn’t speak.  And my father, his voice broken and soft, scattered her ashes into the sand and sea.

Sometimes, it doesn’t feel as though she is gone.  I feel like I haven’t talked to her in awhile, but that she’s just at the other end of the phone.  And then I remember, or I go to the house and it feels hollow, as though something truly vital is missing.  Because, it is.  She is missing.  She is gone and she will never come back.

I hear her voice in my head sometimes.  Her laughter, though faint and faraway.  I feel her expectations for my life, and I feel as though I am failing her.

I think about all the things I wish I had done, all the things I haven’t accomplished  … and often, it just makes me feel tired.  What is worth all that work?  What exactly, is worth the time and money most things require? Anything?

I think about applying to law school, studying for the LSATs.  I think about not going.  All the debt, all the time … it didn’t, in the end, feel worth it at that time in my life.

I think about the restaurants, and the company I helped to build.  I think about balancing checkbooks, and studying spreadsheets about food costs and labor percentages.  I think … yeah, I did that for awhile.  It was interesting.  But I don’t want to do that any more.  It isn’t fulfilling.

I think about grad school, and taking classes and getting a masters or a PhD.  And then I wonder … why?  Just to prove to myself that I can?  What do I plan to do with all that knowledge? … Nothing.  I have no plans for it.

In our ever-changing society, it beomes hard to know what the best choice is — becoming an expert in something (anything?) or knowing a little bit about a lot of things and leveraging that toward success.  Also, do I need a masters in creative writing to write?  Elizabeth Gilbert says that I do not.  So why spend the money?

It’s really about discipline.  It’s about drive.  What do I want to succeed in … and how can I go about doing it?  If there was something, I’m sure I could find a way.  I mean, I leveraged fifteen years of waiting tables to do what I did for seven years in restaurants (not important, but director stuff).  I made that a success when i could have kept taking people’s dinner orders.  I just don’t know what I want to do.  I have no idea.  

Anyway.  That’s what’s on my mind today.

xox, g