I feel a deep restlessness these days. Ambivalence. I do not know where I am going or why and sometimes when I am reading something off my computer I forget mid sentence and start doing something else. This has been happening more and more lately, leading me to wonder whether I am going senile already at 32. I say the age and it seems like a great many years to be on earth, 32, with no idea if I am doing it correctly--that "it" being, namely, living. Some days I think I have lost sight of something very important. I do not know what it is, but I walk around with this emptiness that wants to be filled.

Maybe it is God.

It has been so long since I have thought myself religious. I settled for spiritual years ago and stopped going to church, taking up meditation. But it comes and goes, like the forgotten lyrics to a favorite song. I am trying again, daily, this month. The first few days, the whole time I sat meditating I could not stop thinking over my to-do list. It isn't working, I thought, frustrated. I did not feel any closer to peace or Zen or understanding. That scared me. I wondered whether I had simply forgotten how to connect to something greater. Whether I have been "of the world" too long, lost in material oblivion.

But the past couple of days I have at least been able to go several minutes at a time in blissful nothingness, present to the silence, to the full-emptiness. And in it I feel alone. Like God is not watching. It is a difficult thing to sit with. I am conscious of having asked for certain signs and things that never came, of feeling silly for making those requests, and contenting myself with the knowledge that when the thing comes it will be in God's time. I am still waiting, but losing patience.

Perhaps it is for love or a new job or a new body or a baby, I do not really know. A change.

And I am conscious of having said to myself, if none of these by 40, then I will lose myself completely. Will stop hanging on and go proper mad, running with the wolves or the bulls or whatever people like me do at middle age. I have tried to be conventional, have tried to be unconventional, have tried loving with all my heart and none of it, living like there is no tomorrow or as though the end is very near. And I still don't know anything. I am trying to hold the knowing and the not knowing in me simultaneously. I think this is what is meant by acceptance. It felt impossible at 15, unbearable at 20, and somewhat inevitable now, at 32.

I am not old; but I am not young anymore. I am neither fat, nor thin. I am not alone, but I am single. I am not successful, nor a failure. I am not rich, nor poor. I am not happy, nor sad. I am both an optimist and a pessimist. I am a constellation of experiences that at times make perfect or no sense at all. And so sometimes I am full of the knowledge of where I am going, what I am doing and why; while at others, I have no idea at all.

I used to concoct these grandiose theories of my personal destiny, but I have chosen to take a more realistic view now. It is the only thing that stops me from getting hit when I forget which direction I am supposed to be going in while crossing the street. I tell myself, Think only as far as the next corner, then turn. It is the unfortunate day when I cannot figure out where I am going to begin with, when I dress myself completely and cannot muster the will to go outside.

A woman I spoke to this week put it another way: You have to be ready to get on the bus whenever it leaves. But I do not know which bus I am waiting for, why I should get on it or not. I did not expect to feel this way, ambivalent, now. I was so much more certain in my youth.

There must be a change coming. I do not know what it will be. Perhaps I will not recognize myself afterwards. I suppose then, this blog will serve as a reminder that that I did not know, but was still ok. That God was watching.