Happiness is such a relative concept. If I look at my life from a broad view, there's no question that I've got it pretty damn good. I get paid to sit in front of a computer and design new things. I have a nice house in a great neighborhood. I've got a paid-for car in good shape. I'm in good health and getting better with every passing week. I've got good friends who put up with me and know tons of amazing people who consistently do really awesome things. These are all the things I've been working towards all my life and have been dreaming of since I was a teenager. So why do I feel so disquieted all the time?

It's not real likely that there's one single piece to the puzzle that once found would put everything into true focus and make everything right, but I feel like there could be. Somehow once I completed all my life goals at 26 in a short but reasonably ambitious list, it became harder and harder to find traction in my day to day life in order to keep moving forward. My goals morphed from acquisition to preservation, and from concrete to abstract. I don't need to work towards awesome job, I need to keep the one I have. I don't have to save and work hard to buy a house, I just have to keep paying the mortgage on time.

The idealist goals that I do have are vague and nebulous. I want to make the world a better place, but I don't even have a good definition of better. I want to share the prosperity that I've achieved, but I don't know who to reach out to. I want to make a positive difference in people's lives every day, but I don't know how. I want to be a good neighbor, but really I just squeak by avoiding being a bad one. I want to burst out of my skin with creativity, but I don't dare disturb the fragile order around me. Suburban banality is stultifying.

Its odd to feel like I took the bland fork in the road when my past self was faced with a choice of direction. In an alternate universe I'm writing this from a mountaintop overlooking a sunset, surrounded by beauty and adventure and laughing at the thought of a series of events that would have locked me into a 50 by 100 foot plot of land in Baltimore County. Somewhere out there I take a deep cleansing breath and smile at the amazing adventure of my life. Here I exhale quietly on my steps as the distant thunder of jackhammers and whistle of reversing construction equipment break the 1 a.m. silence and wonder what could have been.

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