Converging Paths

Lately I've keep having this dream. The cutest little blond girl in a bright sundress twirls and twirls in a field of green. She is half me, that is quite clear, but there are foreign features in her face- the half of a man I don't yet recognize. The combination of her takes the best pieces of the two, and makes them better somehow. She is infinite in spirit, and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. She calls out for me to join her. And I wake with the unshakeable feeling that she's waiting somewhere...

And so I wonder...

I remember growing up and dreaming of Italy. I bought travel books with tales of places near and far. I wrote lists upon lists of places I would see. I decided Copenhagen would be first. I envisioned countless adventures - on a Vespa at midnight in Paris, tanning on the beaches of the Mediterranean, climbing the Great Wall. Knowing everything and yet nothing about the world, I would find life, love, food, fun, beauty, art, architecture, spiritual root with the world, and pieces of myself I never even knew existed. I had been so sure for so long that this was what I wanted - to be out and alive. I've wanted it so bad it is a thirst that has never left my mouth, like that for water on a hot humid summer day.

My world was big. Vast, expansive, and to be explored. All my life, it has been the only form of the world I have known. So now that I find my world shrinking in around me, my desires that were once boundless, now find infinite comfort in the idea of an acres spaces with green grass, a white house, and a picket fence, I wonder: how do we know if we're settling, or if what we thought we wanted, just isn't really what we wanted? How do know when to stop looking for happiness? What if on the way to our life's journey, we stumble in to something wonderful - are we to abandon it and keep going? Is the line between following seredipity down a promising path and one of resentment really a line at all? Or are our choices really OUR choices, to be deteremined and later passed or failed with whatever judgement we wish to pass upon them?

And how do I become this new person I want to be without giving up the person I thought I was?