More than One Life

Shamash says, quite reasonably, that she wants to be More than One Person. I keep coming back to this post since she put it up a while back, pondering the wisdom and learning in her searching. A quote:

"I am a pie, parceling out my life into slices, never completely satisfying any dream. In giving a little here, a little there, every portion is half-assed. I am exhausted with it all."

As I commented on her site, when I started collecting things for this project, I had this vague idea that if only we could align our lifestyle choices with our values, integrating the most important parts of our lives into one optimized, meaningful superlife...then everything would be all good. And it might be all good if you could pull it off, but it may be impossible.

So many of our values (and dreams and goals) -- even core values -- are mutually exclusive. They can't be integrated into one life. Instead, we're stuck deciding which ones we want to compromise on, which ones go on the backburner, and which ones get current attention. And life often intervenes to pull us in different directions, spreading us too thin even when we think we've got things set up pretty well.