This is the latest I’ve started, I’m a little sleepy, but I don’t feel worried about being sleepy this time.

We had our second family meeting today and it went so much better. My daughter gave a little presentation, we talked about weekly goals, team building ideas, watched a half budgeting video from YouTube and had an open floor for problems, my daughter brought up her friend playing too rough.

I taught close quarters combat today for martial arts class, we covered heel strikes, elbow strikes (vertical and horizontal), knees, practiced a knife disarm that we knew already in close quarters finishing with a guillotine, we practiced front kicks with an elbow strike in a hallway.

I am surprised at how well I adapted to writing at night. When I started I thought I could never like writing at night as much as the morning, but actually I think I could adapt to either one.

So much of who I think I am is just what I’ve already done, when I have to try new things I usually can do them.

For awhile I thought I couldn’t make friends, but I just wasn’t meeting the right people. It sounds judgmental, but that isn’t how I mean it. Eventually I met a lot of people who were easy to be friends with, it’s not necessary to have the same preferences to be friends, but if you don’t enjoy each other’s company there isn’t much point to wasting free time.

I’m thinking about what project is next, if I can keep writing for 14 days I hope to switch from free writing to a particular project, but I don’t have any particular project in mind.

I kind of gravitate towards children’s books, but I don’t know, I’m not clearly driven one way or another. I like non-fiction, I like science fiction, I like fantasy. There was an author Joy Wilt-Berry who wrote hundreds of informative books, but in a humors, cartoon style, I perhaps would want to do something similar, but I lack a feeling of providence.

I’m not sure that I’ll ever feel a strong pull towards any project, so I feel like just starting with something and getting used to it.

Perhaps I’ll do something describing martial arts, Bruce Lee was working on a guide to mixed martial art’s techniques when he died. I read the publish notes and have a desire to update and simplify what he wrote. Like Stephen Hawkings, Bruce Lee liked to write about specific information in a way that the common person could understand the content. I really like that.

I’ve always loved books, but so many books that I am having as much trouble picking one type of topic as I imagine I would to be disciplined to finish a project (or more).

Some of the books I enjoyed as a child, “Little House on the Prairie” took me inside other people’s lives and families, others were fantasy but they weren’t pure escape, they were moral and ethical thought experiments like “Tuck Everlasting” about a family that lived forever and the complications of the effect it has on the psyche to watch all your friends and contemporaries pass and live on without knowing your burdens will ever end. Some of the books I enjoyed made me more independent as a female, “Island of the Blue Dolphin,” some made me question society the good and bad sides of it “The Giver,” “Hatchet.” I read zoology, physics, quantum mechanics, chemistry, and plenty of non-fiction. But plenty of fiction as well “The Golden Compass,” “Clone,” “Alien,” “The Color Purple,” “The Color of Distance,” “The Forever War,” “The Princess of Mars.” Some people have a low opinion of fiction, but I always find as much education in fiction as in non-fiction, education about words, ideas, free thinking and humanity.

I became interested in habit change a few years ago, and one thing I noticed was that there is a large disconnect from what we do and want to do and what we think we should do. It isn’t ethical or will power, or not completely, it’s sometimes an lack of surety of how to handle the small details.

The interesting thing about books isn’t just the words, the stories, but the ability to try on an experience and also the ability to step outside my normal perspective, sometimes reading leaves me a different person from the person who started reading. Sometimes a better person, but often just subtlety different.

I think I’ve gathered a lot of courage from reading, seeing people make it through worse experiences than I’ve ever had to go through seems to lend me some strength. I wonder if that’s okay, if my inspiration should be grounded in reality, in myself or if it’s fine to take it from anywhere?

Each morning I’m grateful for another morning, each week seems to be slightly better than the last week, but I still have an unease about not knowing what the next step will be.

I’m just allowing that feeling of unease, I know both that life is sweeter with mystery, that I can’t know the future, that I can only live in the moment, but also that I have a tension of not knowing if I am living up to my potential. I find it impossible to know if I’m living up to my potential without knowing what my real responsibilities are.

I assume it’s taking care of my kids, and I do that as well as I personally can, but it also feels like there is something else I’m meant to do and I’m so unclear about what that is. Over the last two years I’ve become more at peace with the unknown, but the curiosity remains in the back of my mind at some level all the time and some jealousy of the people who seem to know is always there as well.

It’s nice to have the answers, but some come with time.

I know that mentally, but emotionally I don’t want to wait anymore.

I want to know that I am or am not doing enough, yet there isn’t a loading bar I can see or a swirling circle showing I’m going in the right direction.

I want some certainty in an uncertain world, some control of the uncontrollable, I want what I don’t have and that is only ever frustrating. But perhaps frustration is good, perhaps it’s a sign of being on the right path, or if not a sign of being alive at least.

I’ve been getting to know myself more, but I wish to know more that I know (even though I realize that is impossible in the present).