Day 361, Hungry

Listening to: A fan blowing, TV in background

I just got home from having dinner with my friend Joe. I wish everyone had a friend like Joe. He's kind, considerate, intelligent, loves his kids, has been through several levels of hell on earth and has a toothy smile. He's loyal.  Joe is a Marriage & Family Therapist by trade but his real passion is developing a unified theory of brain development. This is where Joe loses me in most conversations. I try to track with him, I really do but I always feel like I need to take some sort of medicine to help my brain digest the ideas he puts on my plate. Tonight was no different.

I told Joe about this project, the blog and how I'm treating 2012 like it's the last year of my life. He asked how it was going and I had a hard time answering. Finally, I said, "honestly, I think it's going to be a hard year." And, I'm being honest with each of you. I expect this year to be difficult but deeply satisfying." I think during this process, I'm going to discover what is really important to me. I'm going to question how I spend my time and that may make the people around me a bit uncomfortable and upset. I'm going to say "yes" to things I don't normally say "yes" to and "no" to things I don't normally say "no" to.

In a lot of ways, it feels like I'm starving myself to discover what I'm really hungry for. Do you ever wonder what you're really hungry for? So many of us fill our lives with stuff, relationships, food, exercise, just so we don't feel hungry; so we don't feel empty. What if you fasted until you discovered what was making you hungry in the first place? What if you discovered that you already had what you hungered after? How would that change how you lived your life? What if you decided that feeling that empty feeling is okay, that you didn't have to fill it with anything and that the two of you could become friends? What if the empty places in you are just like the empty notes on a music sheet, the space between the music that are just as important as the notes that are played?

This year, I want to know what I'm really hungry for. I want to feel the empty places and I want to be careful about filling them.

For now, Wade.