Undefined

For me the hardest part about creating this blog was deciding on a title for it. The older I get, the harder time I have fitting my ideas into a neat little box. When I was a kid, my mother used to say that I "danced to the beat of a different drummer." But the truth is, I don't even want to dance - I want to write the music. Of course, like a lot of composers and artists, I have a tendency every so often to decide that everything I've "written" is crap and should be burned. I say that in quotations because I'm still on this metaphor for my entire life as opposed to any actual work.

So here I am, a thirty-something, female blogger baring my soul to the internet, wondering if five years from now, I'll read through all my stuff, roll my eyes, and think, "Did I really write that?" After all, if blogging had been more popular ten years ago, instead of pouring my youthful rage into pages and pages of spiral notebooks, I probably would have posted it all online for the whole world to read and about now, I would regret having said a good seventy-five percent of the things I wrote back then. On the other hand, maybe I'm too full of myself if I think that more than a few people on this Earth would actually want to read pages and pages of my opinions on everything.

I'd like to think that I've finally figured some things in life out. I think your teens and twenties are about trying on a whole bunch of outfits to see which identity really fits. I think your thirties are that time when you actually mix and match all those accessories to create your perfect outfit that's you. You finally know what fits and what you like and you can be yourself without really giving a damn about what everyone else thinks. Of course, I say that as an authoritative thirty-two year old, so maybe I haven't finished shopping yet.

So here I am, undefined. And sometimes I think that's the way it's supposed to be on the human journey. God is "I am what I am," the all-knowing, unchanging one. It has been argued that idolatry is the human attempt to define and label God. God is by very nature beyond our comprehension and understanding. Yet so many times we mere mortals say, "Well I am what I am," as a way to excuse our human shortcomings and limitations. But we are not meant to live life being caged, boxed, or defined by what we think we can or cannot do. It is God's place to be what God is and it is our birthright to be free enough to live undefined. And it is so easy for me to have deep thoughts about God and the nature of the universe at one thirty in the morning. But I wonder tomorrow if I will still have the guts to live undefined, or if I will wake up once again finding my identity in my likes or dislikes or my pain or my circumstances or my limitations. I hope tomorrow that I will live undefined.

I said I never wanted to dance as much as I wanted to write the music. Yet, I have gone through my life never liking what I wrote when I listened to it again. I think it was that I wanted to choose what labels I wore rather than letting someone else choose them for me. But maybe the problem all along was that I thought I needed a label.