Be Careful What You Wish For

Curiosity killed the cat...

Lifelong learning is an ideal that most of us aspire to, I think. At least in my life, my motto has always been that when you stop learning, you stagnate, and when you stagnate, ultimately you die. But is there such a thing as too much curiosity?

What if you have such a hunger to learn and/or experience new things that you're never satisfied with what you actually have? It has occured to me, as I've been working through all of these ...issues, for lack of a better word, that perhaps I'm asking too much of the universe.

I've always been the kind of person who actively sought out the next goal, challenge, project, idea, etc. For the most part, I think this has been a positive aspect of my personality; however, maybe this intellectual hunger has carried over into my emotional life. I sometimes wonder if a fear of "settling" and an overly competitive nature makes me unwilling to stay happy with a person/place/situation for the long haul.

Sometimes I think maybe I was just born in the wrong era. I should have been one of the settlers who went West after the Louisiana Purchase! If I'd been with the wagons that rolled into Oregon and California and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time, maybe I would have been content.

On the other hand, every time I start to worry that I have a limited amount of time and a lot of material to get through (or life experience, or projects, or places to see, or love), I think about my great-aunt, one of my role-models: who went to Berkeley while the rest of her generation had babies, who never married, who traveled alone to China and Egypt when she was in her 70's, who took up roller-blading the year she turned 90. And that renews my faith in my own courage and resiliency.

It isn't what you've got, or what you've done, or who you're with that matters in the end. I think it's how you approach life and define who you are -- so what if my thirst for experience, or learning, or whatever you want to call it, occasionally makes me dissatisfied with where I currently am? The fact that I want, I need to keep moving forward in some way, let's me know that I'm still very much alive -- and that I'm not going to spend the next 50 years as a passive observer, on the couch of life, watching TV.

Where are those damn rollerblades anyway?