Never surrender your midget...

So, I'm finishing the day much like I do any other nowatimes--playing brain games online. It gives me a little challenge, a little competitive outlet before retiring to sleep lately filled with slightly bizarre and frustrated dreams of incompletion and despair. I enjoy it (the games, but also the dreams, oddly enough). But as the hours slip from post to ante meridian, I realize that there might be something else at play here, something less graspable than the rules to the word teaser test, something shapeless that, for now, slips incongruously between the layers of stacked Tetris blocks and watches me from the screen. It is my very self, exhausted and emptied of ambition so as to be nearly transparent, unrecognizable. This is the self that continually builds, but never reaches achievement. The self that trains like mad but then misses the race.
It was in college that I began to become acquainted with this intimate stranger. I chose a degree in Philosophy with a minor in Theatre. The thought was, philosophy is mental calisthenics, perfect preparation for whatever life was to throw at me. Theatre was the socialization, the ability to 'play through' all the situations I would face. Of course, my soliloquy at the point of graduation went something like 'now I can think about having some great rewarding life and act like that's okay...'. As in great dramatic texts, the soliloquy is often one of the most important things to pay attention to. Mine, though a far cry less dramaturgical than most, was nonetheless pregnant with deep meaning. Deep warning, perhaps. Understand, I'm only at the point of beginning to recognize that I shouldn't be stuck in the rut of forever preparing for life to happen. Again, as in theatre, there is little point in rehearsing something ad nauseum without stopping at some point to put it on stage and in front of people. Now, I suppose I could look back and find times where I was actively involved in some significant undertaking as opposed to just waiting in the wings, times where life demanded my focus and all other endeavors were suspended. We can all say that. What I think I am aiming at here is Purpose, that happy midget on the crowded avenue, endlessly bobbing in and out of your line of vision, changing direction without warning, rarely ever simply landing in your lap as you might prefer. It is this midget that I wish to seize, to peer deeply into the soul of, and to once and for all retrieve the answer to that eye-dimming, brow-furrowing, extremity-numbing question: what the heck am I supposed to do? The kind of stuff that when you do it, you aren't thinking about something else you really might like to be doing because this is it. Many have milked that midget for just such revelation. It's so obvious when you see it. People doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing, and being brilliant at it.
Perhaps I'm at a fork in the road, aware that a decision must be made in order to move forward. These are the times I start to ask the big questions, to throw aside the Cartesian Demons and go right for the jugular. I've done it enough to know there's no point trying to tap the vein for all the answers. At this point, I'd be happy with just a thin stream of inspiration...

As a sort of post script, I kind of always thought that writing itself might be or be connected to my purpose, but to read over this and insert 'writing' as the answer to what I should be 'doing', it devolves into a strange circular sort of argument which, as any good philosopher will tell you, presents a wholly fallacious premise. That's probably neither here nor there. Just something I noticed.