Life moves at a pace that can easily leave a person feeling out of breath. This is most true in areas where there are so many demands on your time.

Nothing feels more like a tight box then wanting to move your life one direction but having so many anchors holding you to the current life that is not in harmony with where one wants to go.

This past weekend, had the luxury of talking about one such time when a person can feel boxed into a tight fit with life. While this blog won’t recreate that moment, at the end will be linked some of the resources that was covered this past weekend.

Cornered in a box

As far as this post is concerned, currently feeling a bit cornered in a box. The type that may can relate to. The desire to have a more productive life yet unable to change much. The reality of parenting, the reality of debt, the reality of full time work, the reality of missing out on social events for many reasons.

What’s worse, now that the vision of where life could be is much clearer, it feels there is not enough time to address the work that needs to be done to get there quickly enough.

More specifically, my work takes up a lot of my day. My family takes up the rest of my day. Can’t afford to take an extended amount of time to work on my writing because one needs the job to keep the lights on that allows for dreaming of writing. Worse, I’ve put off my photography and music to give my writing a chance to blossom. But that means my music and photography is really suffering.

To pick up those activities to maintain that skill… that means giving up writing. But the writing is just starting to pick up in skill levels. Finally am in a position to contemplate making a life long goal a reality… writing my own book.

Totally cornered.

There are good meaning people who give me advice. Their advice, back in the day, was very instrumental in helping me transition from adolescence into adulthood. They gave me brilliant advice.

Sadly, today, the complexity of life makes the advice they’re now giving me… feel restrictive. They’re telling me to drop all my extra activities (writing included) and focus 110% on moving my career forward so it won’t stall out. I have too many obligations and not enough income. I need to rise up a good handful of positions quickly to be able to breathe.

But here is the catch… I do that, I feel I guarantee that my dreams get deferred a minimum of a decade out even more. I am no spring chicken or in the prime of my youth. I’m in the prime of my adulthood. A decade is a long time but also a very short time. What is the ideal path to take.

Some say it’s a huge gamble that I’m taking to stick to writing a book that may never sell more than two copies (one from my parents and one from my in-laws). Others feel I gave up on my photography too early or didn’t push it seriously enough. Same for the music.

What I say is this… life has happened as it done did. Can’t cry over spilled milk. The past is informing a lot of the choices I’m making and my job is to make the best choices based on what I know, what I can learn, and what I feel I can do.