Blank Canvas

"The tension is here between who you are and who you could be, between how it is and how it should be." —Switchfoot

Before our big move back across the country, I had every little detail planned. I was working at the magazine up until the day we left California for Massachusetts and I used every spare moment to plan our migration. When we finally got here it took me a while to realize I was here for the long haul. I felt fuzzy and nostalgic. After a week or so passed, I realized that while I had planned every little detail of our trip, I hadn't actually planned what I would do once I got here. Aside from the place we're staying (downstairs from family), which to me was a necessary part of the plan, I left the rest open.

Giving a Libra a blank canvas to work with is not the best idea. We (and I am generalizing here) are indecisive and cautious by nature. Give us an inch and we won't take the mile for fear it will be in the wrong direction. I have enough trouble choosing what artist to listen to on iTunes, let alone what direction to take my life.

At the same time, we are creative and can be quite the dreamers. While I keep applying and interviewing for jobs at corporate publishers or to serve as an assistant to people making three times what they will pay me, I haven't had my heart in it. I know I need a job; I know I need money. I want to save up for a car, a house, my independence, but there is something else inside me, tucked behind my practical side, that feels like it could just explode with all the wasted ambition I have to do something worthwhile—something I really want to do; something creative; something that runs parallel to my dreams.

I know part of the solution is to strive for those things myself, but I am afraid of taking risks, I admit it. I'm afraid of choosing the wrong path. Maybe I already have. The freedom and uncertainty of facing a blank canvas is scary to a Libra and probably to others who are, at this time, struggling to figure out their next move because of hardships. The same part of me that is all but bursting with the urge to do something I actually want to do, something against the "norm," is sitting inside a lot of other people who see the way the world is headed and just don't want to go with it.

Being a cynic, I have little faith I'll be able to break free of the idea of searching for and working a typical job, and I think my soul will most likely go on working 9-5 for other people's dreams that have turned into cold corporate realities. I am prepared to accept this for now, and I will be "happy" when I land a new job—any job—I'm prepared to work for my dreams, but I'm not prepared to put out that fire in my soul that yearns for something greater.