I don’t know what to do with this world. I don’t know what to do in it. I don’t seem to have the constitution, the circumstances, the expertise to contribute solutions to its biggest problems. I care deeply, but am impotent. The best I can muster is often to reassess the organisations I donate meagre funds to, but the reassessment rarely changes anything.
I have been reflecting lately on what I really want from my life; what I would really like to achieve, and what I might be capable of achieving without changing myself into someone I am not. It’s hard, sometimes, to accept the relative safety and comfort of such a question. I have identified a project – a smaller, simpler problem I may be able to effectively tackle.
But the truth is, and I was surprised to learn this about myself, even though, like most things, it has been self-evident for some time: That is not what I want to do. It’s what I will try to do. But what I want is to lend myself to someone else’s cause. Someone I love and believe in, whose cause I can fully align with. Someone I know is better than me at contributing solutions to the world’s big problems. Someone I trust with my life.
I don’t get to choose that for myself. So the next best thing is to be my own leader. To make do with my own capabilities, my own sphere of competence, and try to create something worth creating.