I was recently able to vocalize a thought process that I regularly have, and that’s gotten me to thinking about it.

The thought process can best be summed up as “I don’t know what I want to do with myself/day/life/etc. but regardless of what it is, I don’t have permission to do it, so it’s a good thing that I don’t know what it is I want to do, because I couldn’t do it anyway.”

So which comes first here, working on giving myself permission to do what’s going to make me happy, or figuring out what will make me happy in the first place?

If I work on giving myself permission, that opens the doors to me pursuing my happiness, but doesn’t point me in the direction of where to find it.

If I try to identify what will make me happy first, then I know where I want to go, but will still be holding myself back from going after it.

If I work on both, however, identifying one thing that will make me happy in the moment, and then allowing myself to do that thing, then I’ll find happiness for a fleeting moment.

And that’s all life is, a series of fleeting moments.

Maybe I should stop writing and go make the most of the one I have right now.

Afterthought: Thinking my way through blog posts sometimes helps me work out problems in real time. This has been a prime example of that. That mechanic is what keeps me blogging.