The site title “Aimless” is a moniker I received from my AP Economics teacher Mr. Rosen at Aptos High School (CA) in front of a class of my peers–who didn’t know me except as the shy, new girl whose face turned red when she had to speak—which hit an emotional target that’s taken me over 30 years to fully understand.
I was someone born looking for the deeper meaning–read spiritual books at an early age, took religious studies courses, purposely-geared my UCD psych degree into the “pseudo-science” of what consciousness was–so the description of “Aimless” was not only an insult but a fear. For to be “Aimless” was like saying I’d never find the enlightenment the Buddha described, or walk the earth in love with humanity like Jesus. “Aimless” was someone ambling purposelessly along a road of meaninglessness, the glancing blows of love and experience barely reaching into the heart of who I was and what I thought was important.
But now at 50 years old, I see things more clearly.
Because over the course of my life, I did feel aimless. I’ve lived in four states–moved in and out of towns and cities, and relationships–became a single parent in 2007 after a savage divorce, went back to school for a masters degree in teaching and started a pet sitting business to supplement my income then graduated in 2011 into Life’s cosmic sense of humor where I didn’t get a job, experienced unemployment, financial hardship, personal traumas with my daughters, irreparable rifts with the unkind and judgmental, and all the other full catastrophes (grief, fear, isolation, desperation) until I began to question the validity of a life which could deliver such experiences. Who cares about deeper meaning when things are so hard and why do I even want to be here for this cruel social experiment known as “humanity”?
But one night while sitting on the stairs of my former home, as the wreckage of my life hit my heart with an incomparable loneliness, I reached a stillness from which I rose knowing that within the external circumstances of any life will still always rest the profound purity of the love we have to give. And that it is in fact the love we offer and have offered this world that turns back upon us to speak into our soul when we most need it.
I currently live in Salt Lake City, UT, was 50 on 10/1/2018, am a single parent of two girls (Julia, 21 and Livy, 18), a business owner/pet sitter, an animal lover, a teacher, a writer finding her voice, a devoted believer in the emotional freedom that comes with complete authenticity, and an aimless soul intent on expanding into the ever-changing truth of a single second.
Because the search for a deeper meaning to life is an unsolvable logic puzzle unless we can find a way to live within the spontaneous creativity of what you do inside just one moment. For it is only in those moments that meaning itself is experienced and created.
And such it is that all these years later, I bow to the wisdom of Mr. Rosen, the painful clarity of emotional targets, and the dark nights of the soul that forced me to explore the deeper significance of myself.
Beyond this site, I also post writing to Instagram @aimless1001 and pet sitting pictures (and occasional essays) to @amythesitter.
Thank you and have a peaceful day.
Aimless. (Permanently: TBD).
Aimless...on a path to wherever 